Lakota Stories in the Classroom is Here!

Oh by the way....   Niche audience of ed policy nerds whom I've totally been neglecting as of late so that I could tend to my mistress, she's finally launched:

http://lakotastories.edublogs.org!

Lakota Stories in the Classroom has been in the works for fifteen months.  By no means did I work on it continuously during that time, but when I did work on it, it was pretty intense.  So, it's been extremely gratifying not only to receive emails from teachers I've never met who are excited about using the resource, but also, to see that the website (which has an even smaller niche audience than edskeptic.com) received over 150 hits on the day of its launch, and on average about 50 hits per day each day since.

I still, however, have the same self-criticisms that I've always had about the project.  In an ideal world, I would want a curriculum that does justice to both the pluralist and the cosmopolitan multicultural ideals, never mind that they're mutually exclusive, as I wrote about in August.  But, looking over the resource, I realize that maybe I haven't given Lakota Stories in the Classroom enough credit...  I do mention other cultures besides the Lakota, however superficially.  Not only does one 3-5 social studies unit mention other tribes besides the Lakota, in the very same unit, there's also a geography exercise that uses a map of South America!

In short, I don't think that Lakota Stories in the Classroom is perfect in terms of the American Indian educational ideal in general.  I still don't know quite what that ideal is. But, the videos are way cool, and I hope that the website will help a little bit in terms of keeping the Lakota language (well, truthfully, a select list of 264 important vocabulary words) alive.

More Lakota Story Videos

As I explained in this post, I'm currently editing videos to be used in a curriculum that is relevant to the Lakota language and culture.  Here are three more.

The first two, oriented towards K-2, are among my favorites.  The storyteller, Philomene White Lance, is my former co-teacher and a good friend of mine.  I taught several of her grandchildren.  When she tells stories in English, she integrates Lakota vocabulary.

The final one (for now) is oriented at 3-5.  The storyteller is Sylvan White Hat.

The Common Core and Cosmopolitanism

So, I originally was going to post my response to Tom Hoffman's comment in the comment field, but it got a bit lengthy....  Re yesterday's post, Tom wrote: "The Common Core standards have absolutely nothing to say about cosmopolitanism."  And he's correct.  It's imprecision on my part to suggest otherwise.

Yes, Tom, the Common Core standards have nothing to say about cosmopolitanism, but they assume cosmopolitanism as an underlying ideal.  Here, I take cosmopolitanism and pluralism as two (albeit dichotomous) responses to the Anglo-centric, racially homogeneous Dick and Jane reading curriculum that educational activists in the 1950s and onward rebelled against.   If you'll remember, this

a.k.a., insufficient attention to the realities of a multicultural world, is why Johnny can't read.

Cosmopolitan multiculturalism says that students should learn from authors of a variety of cultural backgrounds.  Students should be exposed to a world in which their role models are Jamaican, Polish, Japanese, Cherokee, Somalian, Puritan, Mexican, and Female.

Pluralist multiculturalism, however, says that students from a specific cultural background should be taught in a way that is relevant to their specific cultural background.  Lakota students should learn about the strength of Crazy Horse, the fortitude of Sitting Bull, and the compassion of Spotted Tail.

I'm not really in a position to comment on how well the Common Core does cosmopolitanism, but having read the standards, I can say that it's clear that cosmopolitanism is a goal. No one can criticize the Common Core for being too blonde-haired and blue-eyed; it draws reading materials and teaching points from a wide range of cultural experiences. And this is sensible.  To the extent that the Common Core standards aspire to be common, they should not privilege any one cultural experience (at least within the American context) to the exclusion of others.  Such a claim does not necessarily call for watered-down, touchy-feely inclusiveness at the expense of rigor--although it's one possible (and wrong) interpretation.  Rather, cosmopolitanism done right achieves the correct harmony of voices, such that no student feels alienated from the curricular material, but at the same time, ensures that major national and world historical events are addressed during the course of a child's education, and not replaced with trivial historical occurrences just so that some perfunctory form of multiculturalism is payed lip service to.  Cosmopolitan multicultural education attempts to realistically mimic the contours of a diverse world.

My project--and this is perhaps a self-criticism--does just the opposite.  If teachers followed my science and social studies units strictly (and based on how comprehensive they are, it would be possible for a teacher to use my curriculum and nothing else for an entire year), students would only learn concepts through the lens of Lakota culture.  In the K-5 world created by my units, there are no Jamaicans, Italians, or Somalians.  In my history curriculum, there is just "Lakota" and "other."  And of course, the most prominent others are the American colonialists and the Western settlers; students learn an American history that focuses on conquest and the clash of two civilizations.

Why promote this kind of learning?  In spite of the fact that my curriculum narrows rather than expands, and endeavors to make students future citizens of a tribe rather than future citizens of the world, I've come to peace with the idea that the unique legacy of a people like the Lakota justifies a curriculum that comes with perhaps ugly trade-offs. I won't go into a tirade about Indian boarding schools and forced assimilation, but suffice it to say, that in the community where I used to teach, it seemed that only thing that brought hope and energy to the poverty-stricken, gang-ridden, desperate rurality of the reservation was the possibility of cultural reclamation.  My Lakota coworkers and friends really, really wanted to bring back their language and their culture, to rebuild a concrete identity for themselves, rather than continue to define themselves in terms of a lost one.

I would love to reconcile the cosmopolitan and pluralist ideals.  I just don't know how. At least in theory, cosmopolitanism promotes empathy, cultural solidarity, and teaches students how to conduct themselves when they encounter difference.  Cosmopolitanism would seem to be the antidote to narrow-mindedness and nascent racial bigotry.  But, I don't know how cosmopolitanism would help the Lakota get their culture back. As it stands, the school where I taught had a mission statement wherein students where supposed to emerge as citizens of two worlds, the English world and the Lakota world, an ideal that was far from ever concretized.  This, as a tribal elder once told me, is because the school leadership thinks of "Lakota time" as a thirty minute language lesson inserted neatly into each day, rather than an underlying philosophy of education that drives all instructional practices.  If Lakota time were integrated wholesale, the school might actually achieve its cultural mission, creating a generation of Lakota citizens who would teach their kids the language and the culture, who would then go on to teach the language and the culture to their kids, breaking the cycle of lostness and forgetting.

The analogy, of course, is that a mostly white student population should learn Dick and Jane, a mostly Hispanic population should learn Dominic and Juanita, and so on.  Such an analogy is precisely the basis of my self-criticism: there is a huge danger of parochialism and forced insularity that comes with a curriculum such as the one I'm working on.  I offer no neat solutions, only what I hope is an honest acknowledgement of the problem.  And in the end, I'll willfully assume responsibility for the problem if it makes even a minuscule difference in helping the Sicangu Lakota Oyate get their language back.

Lakota Stories in the Classroom

This blog post might be alternatively named "Confessing My Schizophrenic Tendencies." In the education blogosphere, I have two radically distinct, and probably uncompromisable, personalities.  Here I am, domain name "EdSkeptic.com," decrying most ed reform ideas currently being acted upon.  In another place in cyberspace (I won't post the address at the moment because the domain is currently a mess), I am a cheerful multiculturalist, an education practitioner with a non-cynical mission.  The project I'm working on is based on the idea that the education of Lakota students should draw from the Lakota language, Lakota beliefs, and Lakota cultural practices.  (This concept is generalizable to all of American Indian education, but my main area of knowledge and interest is the Lakota.)  I'm trying to create free dowloadable K-5 science and social studies unit plans that are aligned to South Dakota standards, but at the same time, focus on Lakota stories and teach the Lakota language.  On Day One of each unit (e.g., "Plants"), teachers will play students a video that has a Lakota elder telling a story that goes with the unit (e.g. "The Origin of Prairie Flowers").  The unit will unfold from there, with activities and exercises that integrate Western concepts and Lakota concepts.  (Or at least, that's the idea.)

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how this project fits in with the Common Core standards, which (depending on how they're implemented) may espouse cosmopolitanism rather than pluralism as an underlying ideal.  And this leads to the question.... Is it a good thing to espouse cosmopolitanism rather than pluralism as an underlying ideal?  There are reasons to think the affirmative.  But this invalidates my whole project, which I'm pretty attached to, philosophically and otherwise.  But there is much waxing edskeptic on my alter ego to come.  Right now, I just want to post some of the Lakota storytelling videos.  I'm pretty damn proud of them (except for a typo in the last video, a misspelled Lakota word) and they won't have a home on the internet for another month.

Here's Homer White Lance giving his rendition of the Lakota creation story.  (This is geared towards grades 3-5.)

Here's Sylvan White Hat with "Iktomi and the Dreamcatcher."  (Grades K-2.)

Here's Sylvan again with "Again Spider and the Ducks."  (Grades K-2.  As I envision it, the teacher will pause to read aloud the questions at the end, asking students for their answers before pressing play again.)

Finally, Sylvan on the Lakota virtues.  (Grades 3-5, I think.)

One more.  Here's Homer talking about generosity, one of the Lakota virtues.  It's not really a story; it's just Homer talking.  I think it'll be for K-2.

Feedback welcome.  Thanks for watching.

What is the Meaning of "Stakes"?

Over at Core Knowledge, Robert Pondiscio recently blogged about how a knowledge-rich curriculum will not raise test scores.  Maybe over the course of three years, four years, or five years, but not immediately.  The criticism he articulates is familiar, but Pondiscio puts it well: "The high stakes associated with reading tests may not preclude teaching a knowledge-rich curriculum, but it arguably disincentivizes it."

Yes, it's all about incentives.  The best bet for teachers looking to maximize student test scores is to teach students testing strategies and to replace classroom sessions where students hold books and read them with classroom sessions where students practice filling out workbook pages like the following:

(I lifted this page from Spectrum Test Practice Grade 2, which can be found on Amazon.)

I know a teacher, in fact, whose entire curriculum was test preparation workbooks, the whole year long.  And her students consistently earned the best reading scores in my former school.

Yes, through test preparation workbooks, second graders might learn different phoneme sounds; indeed, they might even learn how analyze words.  They might learn how to eliminate wrong answers and choose the correct one after reading a short passage.  But will they learn how to enjoy a book?  How can we thrust a high school curriculum that includes To Kill a Mockingbird and the like upon students when our second graders are being trained in strategies rather than in reading?

Okay: let's say that you've bought the argument.  High stakes testings comes with perverse incentives for teachers to replace content-rich curricular possibilities with test prep.  What about the alternative?

In the past on this blog, I've pushed a platform that includes in-school teacher evaluations and no-stakes tests like NAEP to assess teachers and students.  However, I've recently been challenged by a friend of mine on the question of no-stakes tests.  Yes, with high stakes tests come perverse incentives.  But with no-stakes tests, students have absolutely no incentive to do well, so (if they have a modicum of rationality) they'll do the easy thing, which is to fill in bubbles swiftly and without thinking.  Thus, no-stakes tests tell us nothing at all.

Except for one thing.  Some students are trained to take seriously every test that is put in front of them.  Sometimes it's family culture that produces this result; sometimes it's school culture; sometimes it's national culture.  So, students who score well are those who know the material and take the test seriously.  When it comes to no-stakes tests, we cannot, alas, differentiate between students who don't know the material and students who do know the material but don't take the test seriously.

It's a good criticism, and damning to the idea that there are any standardized tests with psychometric measures that are actually valid.  (Unless researchers come up with a way to measure students' test-oriented motivation, and only measure highly motivated students against other highly motivated students.)  However, I think that there's a way to save no-stakes testing.  Basically, since teachers and school leaders exercise control over the curriculum, they are the only individuals for whom there exists a perverse incentive to tamper with it by teaching to the test.  So, on standardized tests, there should be no stakes for teachers (don't we all want content-rich curriculums?) but high stakes for students (for whom the test is determinative of whether they are promoted to the next grade, get to join Gifted and Talented or take advanced math, skip a grade, score high enough to enter a charter school lottery for middle or high school, etc.)  It is up to the teacher to motivate students to do their best, but the teacher himself should have nothing at stake.  Besides, of course, the oh-so-wholesome delight of seeing his students succeed.

Mike Petrilli on Scalby Primary and Why School Choice Maybe Should Be on my Agenda

There aren't a whole lot of ed policy podcasts out there.  And so, I listen to The Education Gadfly pretty much every week, even though it's quite clear that its home organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has an agenda.  (Full disclosure: So do I.  But my agenda doesn't align perfectly with that of Fordham, which is why I am reluctant to wholeheartedly endorse the Gadfly.)

Disclaimers aside, the July 7 episode features something really worth talking about.  A relatively new segment, What's Up With That?, features the story of Scalby Primary, a UK school which has forbidden parents, guardians, and other adult chaperons at the annual Scalby field day from taking photos, lest said photos are posted online and used to abet pedophiliac activity.  The segment prompted an extemporaneous rant from Mike Petrilli, vice president of the Fordham Institute and host of the podcast, about school choice.  I'm transcribing Mike's words:

I've become such a believer that one of the main reasons why we need school choice in our system is these sorts of issues around school culture and norms.  I mean, you basically, in my view, want to take all the really anal parents, and put them in one school together, and then take all the laid back parents and put their kids together.  And they can each have a school that meets their needs more perfectly.  So if the anal parents want to have a no-photo policy because they're afraid that these things are going to happen, fine.  That's their choice.  And if the laid back parents want to say, you know what, we're not going to stress out about this kind of stuff, fine.  But what you're trying to do is push all these different parents in the same kind of school and they fight about things like this.

The thing is, in spite of my support of Diane Ravitch-y claims about being wary of silver bullets, saving public schools, and most importantly for me, worrying about the perverse incentives packaged into high stakes tests, I actually agree with Mike's statements.  For a long time before charter schools were cool, I supported school choice in the form of magnet schools.  I really liked the idea of having small, specialized high schools devoted to the arts, or to science and technology, or to the humanities, or whatever.  As I saw it, specialized magnet schools had the potential to create cultures of solidarity, where the particular brand of learning promoted by a given school excites the interest of faculty and students alike.  This seemed a preferable alternative to the one-size-fits-all typical American high school, with its dry textbooks and its teachers mismatched to content areas.  I went to college with a girl who had attended Science and Math in North Carolina, and what was great about that school, besides its being one of the top-performing schools in the nation, is its promotion of nerdiness--for athletes, for non-AP students, for everyone.  In fact, I'm sure that the culture fostered by Science and Math has a lot to do with its performance.  (So: not excessive test prep, merit pay, cheating, etc.)

In short, I liked the idea of students living in an area where they had the option of going to a Science and Math, a Community School for Social Justice, a Core Knowledge High School (with its focus on the liberal arts), or a Bell Multicultural School.  I liked the idea of students sitting down with their parents to really think about the educational setting in which they would flourish.  I thought that the act of choosing a school would itself empower a student, who is at that age where it doesn't matter how good (or horrid) his clothes look, as long as he was the one to pick them out.  Choosing a school is an adult act, and I think that a student faced with low grades or behavioral referrals, threatened (idly or not) to shape up his act or get kicked out, would be more willing to change his study habits and behavior.  Autonomy is what I'm talking about.  And so, I got really excited when Petrilli was talking about schools for anal parents and schools for laid back parents.  Yes, Mike, I could see that working.  Yes!

So why don't I spend more time talking about why school choice is (potentially) a good thing?  Even though I haven't changed my opinion about the autonomy and empowerment that might come with a more choice-friendly system, the School Choice Movement (capitalization intentional) has become this monolithic entity, a portmanteau of the Merit Pay Movement and the High Stakes Testing Movement and the Anti-Rubber Room Anti-Tenure Movement and the Anti-Union Movement and the Corporate Charter School Movement.  While I can clearly see the pros and cons of each listed item, when rolled up together, I'm ultimately most friendly to the critics of the cheerful choice-mongerers.  The way the Fordham Institute, Education Next, Bill Gates, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and others have packaged their movement, the equivocal among us feel compelled to either accept or reject.  And when it comes down to it, I'm much more committed to exposing the fallacies of high stakes testing than I am to endorsing a particular brand of magnet school-ism that, literally, no one who's anyone in the world of ed reform has talked about in ten years.  Which is why being destructive rather than constructive is what's on my agenda.

What's Wrong with IMPACT?

...A few things.  But not everything.

IMPACT, Washington D.C.'s teacher evaluation system, has received a lot of press lately. There's Sam Dillon's piece, which gives the perspective of a terrified first-year teacher afraid for her job, and then Bill Kerlina's confessional in the Washington Post about why he, a young principle, quit his job.

I've never been a Michelle Rhee fan (IMPACT is her baby) but I'm here to defend it, kinda. First, some background.  IMPACT is an evaluation system that distinguishes between teachers with and without "value added student achievement data," a.k.a., 4th through 8th grade reading and math standardized test scores.

"Group 2" teachers are those for whom a definitive value added statistic cannot be computed because they teach something other than 4th through 8th grade reading or math.  So these are the social studies teachers, science teachers, lower elementary reading and math teachers, high school reading and math teachers, etc.  According to the IMPACT handbook, Group 2 teachers are evaluated by in-classroom observations (75% of the total score), non-value added student achievement data (10%), value added student achievement data (5%), school/community involvement (10%), and professionalism (evaluated qualitatively).  There are five  in-classroom observations per year, three by the principal and two by master educators.

Common criticisms of IMPACT are as follows:

(1) People don't like the merit pay component.
(2) People don't like the fact that IMPACT scores can be used to fire bad teachers
(3) Support is not given to struggling teachers, only punitive measures
(4) Test scores are a factor, especially for Group 1 teachers
(5) No forgiveness/leniency for teachers in high-needs schools

As for (1) and (4), my main complaint is that the pet program of people who frequently use a battle cry of "Not Research Based!" to disparage their opponents lacks a basis in research, i.e. it is Not Research Based.  In short, I'll be sympathetic to the critics of merit pay until it's proven that merit pay actually improves educational outcomes for low-income students.  (And I do mean ACTUAL educational outcomes.  I don't want no inflated-through-mindless-test prep faux-achievement achievement, I don't want no cheating scandals.)

But, (2) and (5) don't really bother me.  Having seen and heard stories of teachers who were retained year after year, given two billion second chances to learn classroom management, etc., I have to think that it takes much more thought and effort to fire a teacher than to retain a teacher, even if said teacher is really, really bad.  As for (5), it makes my skin boil to think that we should have lower standards for teachers in high needs schools than for teachers working in high-income neighborhoods.  More is at stake for the students in high needs schools--we need better teaching, which means high standards for instruction.  It wasn't clear from the Sam Dillon piece as to whether the teachers who were censured for failing to notice their students eating and texting during their lessons were in high needs environments.  But, it shouldn't matter.  It makes no difference how dazzling your history lesson is if students are engrossed by other things.  If you're a teacher, you have to devote half your attention to what you're saying (which is why you have to know that material darn well) and half your attention to what your students are doing.  While outlining the four causes of the American Revolution, or fielding a question, or explaining the assignment, or cold calling students, or whatever, the teacher should be circulating throughout the classroom, and without ceremony, taking the cell phone, or the sandwich, and slipping it into his/her pocket.  (Yes, it's gross to put a sandwich in your pocket.  So goes the life of K-12 teacher.)

Let's talk about (3).  Lack of support was main complaint of Bill Kerlina, who to be quite frank, came across as a major crybaby.  But, I contend that the IMPACT system is a step in the direction of more support, and better support, more so than its alternatives, which include the status quo.  I really, really like IMPACT's emphasis on in-classroom observations.  It forces principals to get into the classroom (the eternal temptation for school leaders to be beholden to paperwork in one's office), and also, creates a network of expert teachers who can see precisely what teachers are doing well and poorly.  Test scores don't tell you much, and sometimes give false information about a teacher's quality.  But, it's pretty hard to fake it for an entire lesson.  Short of threatening your students with corporal punishment on a to-be-named date in the future if they don't behave, it's impossible to abracadabra a structured, well-functioning classroom.  Such is only the product of months of deliberate, dedicated work.  Perhaps right now, mentor teachers are coming into the classroom, filling out their forms, and leaving without giving teachers much by way of feedback.  But, the first-year science teacher in Dillon's article certainly sounded like she got feedback.  And the teachers who allowed texting and eating?  Sounds like they got their feedback too, except they didn't like it.

In short, unlike standardized tests, in-classroom evaluations answer a ton of questions about teacher performance.  Are they well-prepared?  Are they able to simultaneously deliver material and manage student behavior?  Are they interesting to listen to?  Do they explain concepts clearly?  Are they providing students with age- and developmentally-appropriate material?  How's their rapport with their students?  How receptive are they to student questions?  Do they have ways to meaningfully gauge whether their students are learning the material, or is their style all lecture/homework? Are they accommodating students with special needs? Do they seem like they know what they're doing?  Yes, most likely the system needs to be honed.  Maybe make it so that low-performing teachers have ways to be in contact with their mentors--according to my calculations, mentor teachers evaluate about one teacher per day, so there should be plenty of time for extra support.  But the movement from standardized test-based evaluation to in-classroom evaluation can't be a bad thing....

Except that this is not quite the trajectory.  Remember when I said that there were Group 1 and Group 2 teachers?  Group 1 teacher evaluations are 50% value added student achievement data, 35% in-classroom observation, etc., etc.  According to the IMPACT brochure, the goal is to shift from a Group 2 evaluation framework to a Group 1 evaluation framework:

Over the next few years, we will be implementing developmentally appropriate standardized assessments for students in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. We will also be adding end-of-course exams for secondary English, math, science, and social studies. As these assessments are rolled out, more teachers will be moved from Group 2 into Group 1.

If things unfold as proposed, I officially retract all compliments, and predict a bleak future of cheating, cheating, and more cheating.  Excuse the cheesy turn of phrase, but a Group 2 evaluation framework is the only way IMPACT can make a positive impact.