Teachers Are Not Learning to Teach

I stumbled across two articles. One, from City Journal, is pretty short. The other one, from Quillette, is pretty substantial - at least by internet standards. It must have taken at least 15 to 20 minutes to read - an eternity in today's fast-paced world.

The City Journal article is about the American Education Research Association. The Quillette article is about the teacher training program at the University of Washington's Secondary Teacher Education Program, aka STEP. Neither the AERA or STEP program are truly interested in teaching teachers to teach. Rather, they're both concerned with creating social justice warriors. Who needs to teach reading and math when you can teach children their proper spot on the "victim hierarchy pyramid?"

From City Journal:

A symposium called “The Interrogation of Whiteness in Progressive Public Schools” promises to explore “the experience of teachers and education leaders who work to undo whiteness in public schools.” A featured paper in that session is “Trust, Community, and Dismantling White Dominance.” Another, “Critical-Race Elementary Schooling: Teacher Change Agents are Undoing Whiteness in Elementary Schools,” celebrates teachers who “actively resist elements of Whiteness.”

 “Marking the Invisible: Articulating Whiteness in Social Studies” promises that participants will “call out the strategies deployed by white supremacy and acknowledge the depths by which it is used to control, manipulate, confine, and define identities, communities, citizenships, and historical narratives” in order to “promote justice-oriented teaching and learning.” Conference-goers can then attend “Whiteness at the Table: Whiteness and White Racial Identities in Education,” which features an academic exploration of student participation in “The Whiteness Project,”  in a paper titled “Whiteness as Chaos and Weakness: Our ‘Abnormal’ White Lives.” The author of that paper laments that “with complex theory, it feels impossible, on some level, to interrogate whiteness, to suggest that it is something less violent than it is.”

From Quillette:

This focus on ideology comes at the cost of studying the craft of teaching or how to productively deal with difficult social problems on a small scale. Much of the practical teaching guidance we were given has no demonstrable efficacy or validation in the peer-reviewed literature. Most of the classes at the UW require little if any academic work and they often resemble group therapy sessions along with activities like personal journaling, which I tried to undertake with an open mind, despite my sense that these tasks are far removed from the vocational demands of teaching. STEP is a travesty in its disservice to its own students and, because the program neglects the practice of teaching in favor of pontifications on social justice, it lets down the disadvantaged children it purports to serve. Each year it sends out a cohort of graduates who, due to a lack of preparation, are likely to become overwhelmed in a profession already suffering from alarming rates of attrition, particularly in high-needs schools.

One of the more peculiar and psychologically manipulative requirements in STEP is called “Caucusing.” The 60-student cohort is divided into smaller caucuses based on race, sexuality, and gender. In the first quarter, students are segregated by race to discuss their place in the intersectional hierarchy of oppression. White students are required to demonstrate contrition for their privilege with examples of how whiteness, latent racism, and America’s institutionalized racism has benefitted them personally. Essentially, in these classes white people are asked to sit around to free-associate and express how badly they feel about race relations in America. Students of color are put in a separate caucus and at the close of the first quarter the two groups are united into one caucus and, convening in a large circle, are asked to stand up and pat their thighs, rub their palms together and click their fingers—to create the sound of a thunderstorm, for some reason. If my experience is anything to go by, the students of color then regale the group with their painful experiences and excoriate the white students, making accusations of racism and subconscious marginalization. After many tears and public apologies, my caucus finished with everyone being asked to hug one another. The consequences of this acrimony were realized in the following quarter, as the students of color instigated walk-outs in one class to protest about the insensitive manner in which a white instructor and various white students had chosen to discuss the fatal police shooting of Charleena Lyles, a black woman who had been living close to the university campus. This, inevitably, led to further apologies, crying, hand-wringing, mandatory contrite letter-writing for white students, and a deep sense of foreboding each week as the class descended further into chaos and uncertainty from which it never recovered.

Yes, I read both articles in their entirety and concluded that it's going to be difficult to change the current anti-intellectual SJW position. I did disagree though, with the Quillette article author's assertion that

"Additionally, teachers should work to cultivate catholic tastes, and in light of demographic changes, white Americans shouldn't expect the literature and old-fashioned narrative history of Europe and the United States to be considered the normal curriculum with a few token "diverse" authors alongside Shakespeare and Hemingway."

While teachers should work to encourage students to broaden their intellectual horizons, the rest of that statement is pure SJW and is a step toward focusing on the victimhood hierarchy instead of focusing on a solid education. The United States' cultural, legal, and philosophical underpinnings were created over centuries of European and American history by European and American thinkers. That will remain true no matter the students' skin color, and it would be a terrible disservice to not introduce these cultural icons to students.

Sadly though, it seems that the mission to create new generations of activists will continue. There will be little to no push-back because the social justice warriors are in charge and they tolerate no dissent. On the other hand, it's clear from the Quillette article that in most cases social justice warriors end up battling each other over victim status and end up eating their own. So there might just be hope after all - depending on who arrives to pick up the pieces.

Why Elites Dislike Standardized Testing

This was an interesting article from Quillette. We know that everyone hates standardized tests. And with good reason. The reality is that there is a good reason for them. They do tell us things about students and eduction.

Universities have gotten away from only using SATs and ACTs in accepting students preferring a more "holistic" approach. Of course, we know that this move to "holistic" judgements is based on creating quotas for students, making sure that the campus is more "diverse." Too many Asian students  and students from wealthy families were excelling on these tests, thereby creating a monochromatic campus.

As Thomas Sowell points out, many students who have been accepted on this holistic basis, and who have poor test scores end up flunking out. Had they gone to a less prestigious, less challenging school, they may have excelled. But students aren't the point. It's all about virtue signaling.

When some children of big Hollywood stars needed a bit of extra help, some of their parents applied it in the form of hefty bribes. They got caught and exposed. Oops!

Opponents of tests like to argue that tests primarily measure socioeconomic status and parental resources, but it’s not true that rich parents unfairly distort the college admissions process by outspending other people on test prep. There’s not a clear causal relationship between income and test scores, and there’s no evidence that expensive test prep gets better results than cheap or free alternatives.

According to data released by The College Board, the median SAT test taker in 2013 scored a 496 on the SAT’s critical reading section and a 514 on the math. The median student whose family earns less than $20,000 will score a 435 on the critical reading section and a 462 on math, considerably below average. Students from families earing $60,000-80,000 perform similarly to the overall distribution, and median scores continue to rise about 10 points for every marginal $20,000 of family income. The median student from a family earning more than $200,000 per year scores a 565 on critical reading and a 586 on math. The richest students perform a little more than half a standard deviation above average, while the poorest perform a bit more than half a standard deviation below.

But while it’s true that higher-income students get better scores on average and lower-income students do worse, it doesn’t necessarily follow that money raises test scores. This is a mere correlation, and, as anyone who did well on the SAT knows, correlation doesn’t imply causation.

SAT scores correlate strongly enough with IQ that the SAT is interchangeable with IQ as a test of general cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is highly heritable; the single strongest predictor of a child’s IQ is the IQ of the child’s parents. There is also a correlation between income and IQ. That means smarter than average parents are likely to have smarter than average kids and higher than average incomes.

The educational attainment of an SAT taker’s parents is about as strongly correlated with higher scores as high income is; the median student whose parents hold graduate degrees scores a 560 on critical reading and a 576 on math, only slightly lower than the richest students in the dataset by income, and a full standard deviation higher than students whose parents hold only high school diplomas.

There’s also little support for the contention that inequalities in access to test prep is the mechanism by which richer students secure their advantage.

It is true that prep can help; working practice tests can help students get comfortable with the tested concepts and get familiar with the test format and the way the test writers reason. Practicing can also improve the speed at which testers can work the problems, and help them become more confident and comfortable taking the test.

There is much more. Daniel Friedman shreds some of the more popular anti-test, white privilege arguments and argues for a meritocracy in higher education.

Besides, if rich people are trying to buy their unqualified children's way into prestigious schools, admittance cannot primarily be based on privilege. In fact, doing away with testing would certainly open the door to privileged students being able to buy or cajole their way in.

How to protect your kids from Google predators Share, by Michelle Malkin

Michelle Malkin is feeding my paranoia. Maybe she'll feed yours too.

Canvas (by Instructure) is one of myriad “learning management systems” that stores students’ grades, homework assignments, videos, quizzes and tests — all integrated with almighty, all-powerful, omniscient Google. Google apps such as ClassDojo collect intimate behavioral data and long-term psychological profiles encompassing family information, personal messages, photographs and voice notes. The collection of such data is a nanny state nightmare in the making, as a new Pioneer Institute report on “social, emotional learning” software and assessments outlined this week. (See also: Who’s data-mining your toddlers.)

Meanwhile, preschoolers are being trained to flash “Clever Badges” with QR codes in front of their Google Chromebook webcams. These Badges “seamlessly” log them into Google World and all its apps without all the “stress” of remembering passwords. Addicted toddlers are being indoctrinated into the screen time culture without learning how to exercise autonomy over their own data.

Yeah, there's more. I was in that classroom situation. I didn't know about all of the data collection. I did know that for the most part, students on their laptops weren't really learning that much. Learning is no longer a consideration though. Who needs an education when the machines can do it all for us, and Google will even talk to us, avoiding the need to read 'cuz readin' is fer squares, man. It's strictly L - 7.

Results of Poor Teacher Training

A couple of articles caught my eye recently. I've probably mentioned in previous posts that the greatest reason for the failure of American public education is poor teacher preparation. Teachers are not taught to teach correctly.

So students don't learn.

So standards are lowered.

So the next generation of teachers knows less than their predecessors.

So their training has to be dumbed down.

So students learn even less.

So standards are lowered.

So the next generation . . .

This became evident to me years ago when it was decided that spelling wasn't important. Teachers were instructed to reduce emphasis on proper spelling. On the State of Michigan's M-Step test, spelling doesn't matter on the essay portion of the test. Neither does grammar, because that too, along with punctuation no longer matters. Students shouldn't get bogged down in those non-essentials. They should merely express themselves.

There is no consideration for the fact that due to lack of writing mechanics, it's extremely difficult to understand what many students write. In some cases, the day after they wrote it, some students can't even understand what they wrote. And generally, these students can't understand what they read out of a grade-level text because the punctuation, which helps establish meaning is not read. They haven't learned it, so it has no meaning to them. For them, those commas, periods, question marks, and quotation marks don't exist.

Reading, writing, and spelling all go together. They are the elements of literacy. For some students, all three skills are missing.

Then there is the effect on school discipline. There are a lot of really bright students, who, because they were never taught in the way they need in order to learn, can't read. They are frustrated, and they act out. It gets worse as they get older and fall further behind every year. This doesn't apply to all students who are discipline problems, but I believe it applies to a large portion.

And education schools are going more and more in the direction of being the problem instead of the solution.

To anyone acquainted with the history and quality of American ed schools, this should come as no surprise. Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism—not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice—is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

More than three decades later, a comprehensive, four-year study of ed schools headed by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, found that the majority of educational-administration programs “range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” Though there were notable exceptions, programs for teaching were described as being, in the main, weak and mediocre. Education researchers seemed unable to achieve even “minimum agreement” about “acceptable research practice,” with the result that there are “no base standards and no quality floor.” Even among ed school faculty members and deans, the study found a broad and despairing recognition that ed school training was frequently “subjective, obscure, faddish, … inbred, and politically correct.”

A study from 2004, “Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers,” examined the course syllabi used in the nation’s top-rated ed schools and found with distressing regularity one-sided curricula in which complex issues were trivialized and narrow ideological viewpoints treated as settled fact. Un-intellectualism seemed to have given way to anti-intellectualism: “The foundations and methods courses we reviewed suggest that faculty at most of these schools are often trying to teach a particular ideology—that traditional knowledge is repressive by its very nature—without directing their students to any substantial readings that question the educational implications of this view,” concluded the study’s authors, David Steiner, now executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at the Johns Hopkins University, and an associate, Susan Rozen.

And speaking of school discipline:

Valley Oak Middle School teachers were asked to answer two questions about the school's climate and culture.

Overwhelmingly, the teachers said the school's discipline model is broken.  

At a special meeting Thursday night, Visalia Unified School District teachers resoundingly agreed, saying there is a "crisis" in classrooms across the city. 

Parents backed them up on almost every concern. 

Just one teacher spoke in favor of the current discipline model. 

Like many campuses in California, Visalia Unified School District follows the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports system when students misbehave or act out.

With PBIS, students are placed in intervention programs, counseling, and alternative programs before a suspension or expulsion is recommended. Teachers say it's rare that a student ever receives support to address their issues. 

In most cases, they're sent back to class after a brief trip to the office. In some instances, teachers say they are held to answer for why they sent the student, rather than dealing with it themselves. 

Visalia Unified began adopting the model in 2013. Teachers had high hopes. They've been met with disappointment. 

As incidents on campuses have worsened, teachers and parents are pushing back.

We implemented "Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports" or PBIS as it is known, at my school when the last principal I worked under came in. I was even one of the "fortunate" PBIS committee members. We went to regular off-site meetings throughout the year for four or five years, first to learn to implement PBIS, then to "recharge" PBIS, because wouldn't you know, it just never worked as advertised. Inbetween the offsite meetings, we had all day committee meetings in school, in which we collected and aggregated data on students' misbehaviors, came up with positive non-confrontational strategies to deal with students who misbehaved, wrote scripts to teach students (even fourth and fifth graders) proper behavior in all areas of the school, and decide on rewards for students who kept their noses clean.

We also received many binders full of many books and many papers throughout the years of offsite meetings that sat on shelves and in closets when we returned from these meetings. It was all a waste. The one aspect that wasn't considered and that is never considered is proper instruction so that students actually learn what they are in school to learn. These children are not stupid, but constant failure makes them think that they are. So they act out.

How difficult is that to understand?

At some point, a new discipline system will replace the failed PBIS. It too, will fail.

Teacher tests can right past wrongs - or can they?

According to Emery Patchauer in the Detroit News:

In 2013, the State Board of Education attempted to increase the readiness of new teachers by revising the exams they have to pass in order to earn a license. The results were a disaster. In the first round of testing, pass rates for the history exam fell from 71 percent to 25 percent. Social studies fell from 65 percent to 22 percent. Elementary education fell from 83 percent to 49 percent

Does this mean that teachers are less ready, that the new tests showed that teachers needed more education before they walked into the classroom?

Don't be silly.

First, we must resist the logic that says pass rates drop because teachers today are less prepared compared to years past. This is wrong. A sudden drop in scores like we saw in 2013 happens when exams are hastily adopted or not properly piloted. This sudden drop also happens when the exams are made by a company with little connection to the deep work of teaching.

It's all the new test's fault.

Truthfully, I don't know the difference between the pre and post 2013 tests. I do know that it's way too easy to blame a test for a person's shortcomings. I also know that teachers need a knowledge base before they step into that classroom. They can't teach what they don't know, and staying one day ahead of the students you are teaching is not a sound strategy. Later in the article, Patchauer takes race and gender into account. The stats aren't given, but we're made to understand that there are some testing discrepancies between races and genders. Assuming that each class of prospective teachers is made up of students of various races and genders, one should look at students' previous education to discover why this is. Study habits and reading skills might also be issues here.

It seems to me that Patchauer wants a dumbed down test that anyone can pass.

Students can find sample questions on the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification website. There is also an option to buy practice tests. Other options would include studying harder and longer and even getting together with colleagues to study together.

The issue here is that these future teachers attended public schools that did not prepare them to succeed academically. I've already ranted in previous posts about the lack of phonetic reading instruction crippling students' reading abilities. Those skills not learned as a child, will most likely never be learned, and if these teachers someday do pass the test and do enter a classroom, they will do so without the skills needed (because they were never taught them) to truly teach their students.

And that is not the fault of any test.

Diversity First—Education, Whenever

Over the past few generations, school has become less and less about education, and more about all kinds of other things. Even so, teachers, administrators, government officials, schools of education, and parents all insisted that no, children are in school to learn. When they graduate, they're supposed to be able to function as intelligent adults in an increasingly complex society. Graduates are supposed to have the tools they need to earn a living, vote intelligently, raise a family, and entertain themselves. They should be able to read, write understandable prose, and know enough math to shop, manage their finances, read a graph, and know when their being snowed by government officials or other shysters trying to part them from their hard earned money. It also doesn't hurt if they know enough science and history to catch a glimpse of how the world works.

That's what everyone pretended. Now, in New York, they've stopped even pretending.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s school-integration task force just dropped its initial report—a multilayer cake of mostly impenetrable social-justice jargon, interspersed with a dangerous idea or two, and with a dismaying lack of emphasis on the enduring value of teaching children to read, write, and do numbers. In fact, the report represents a significant victory of show over substance, establishing “diversity” as the principal goal of public education in New York City while exiling accountability—teacher accountability, parent accountability, student accountability—to the ash heap.

In its willingness to sacrifice function to form, the School Diversity Advisory Group’s initial report (a second is expected later in this school year) is a classic example of an old trope—to a hammer, the world looks like a nail. As panel member Matt Gonzales told the New York Times: “The idea of a good school versus a bad school is based on narrow assumptions [including tests and attendance].  We wanted to shift the narrative about how we measure school quality. Good schools are integrated schools.”

Or, as the report itself puts it at one point, “the use of exclusionary admissions screens . . . which judge . . . kids on behavior, test scores, and other biased metrics, is the biggest contributor to . . . segregation.” Get rid of “biased metrics,” in other words, and— presto—the problem is solved. But good luck educating children in an environment where behavior and other quantifiable performance standards are deemed an objective impediment to progress.

That's what it's come to. The best and brightest will no longer be allowed to excel. Everyone must be equal, even if that equality leads to a Harrison Bergeron society.

Teacher’s fired for giving zeros to students who didn’t turn in work – leaves goodbye note on board

It has been decided, I'm not sure by whom, but it has been decided in some school districts, including the one I retired from, that no zeros should ever be given on any assignment, ever. Even the assignments that aren't turned in should be given 50%. Our online grade book was set up to handle this requirement.

Unlike the Florida teacher in the article, we all mostly went along with it eventually. I didn't at first, because it is stupid, and because we were never trained on how to make it work in our grade book. Eventually I figured it out.

Part of the rationale for this practice is that it makes it harder for the student who has a bunch of zeros to their grade up once they decide to start doing the work. Or, if they have a bunch of scores below 50% that on work that they did turn in, it makes it hard for them to raise their grades once they understand the concepts and start getting better grades on things.

The problem is that most of the students who turn in little or no work don't care, and they continue to not to most of the work. Yes, there are exceptions, but very few of them. There are ways to work with those students in order to raise their grades to an acceptable level. And the students who continually score very poorly do so because they don't do the class work. And again, most of them never will.

Another part of the rationale for not giving zeros is based on the mathematical difference between a percentage scale, and the four point scale. Yes, there is a difference, and yes it is harder to raise one's grade from a zero than it is from a 50%. But it's also true that in order to show understanding of a concept, knowing something to less than 50% accuracy is not really knowing the concept. The percentage scale, including a zero for not turning the work in, gives the teacher that more accurate picture of a student's abilities and needs.

Then there is the matter or personal responsibility. At some time, in order to become a functioning adult, one must learn and adapt to this concept.

When it comes right down to it, however, she does not regret stand up for what she believes in. 

"A grade in Mrs. Tirado's class is earned," she said. 

"I'm so upset because we have a nation of kids that are expecting to get paid and live their life just for showing up and it's not real," she added. 

If we are concerned with motivating students, we need to concentrate on using more effective teaching strategies (phonics and beginning with basic skills) so that students can actually learn the material. Once they know they can learn and that they are learning, they will be less apt to give up, thinking that's it's all just too hard.

This controversy is just another dodge to avoid addressing the curriculum issue.