Author Archives: Tom White

No More Cupcakes!

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Current Affairs, Elementary, Food and Drink

NocupcakesBy Tom

My school district recently made a bold move. They banned birthday cupcakes and other treats in schools as part of a district-wide wellness initiative. Despite the fact that they’re going to catch some flak (they already have) and despite the fact that I’ll personally miss those 200 calorie bundles of sticky awesomeness, I support the decision. Birthday cupcakes are disruptive, unhealthy and sometimes even dangerous. Let me explain.

Here’s what happens on a typical birthday. The special child’s parent swings by the office sometime in the morning to drop off a large plastic box containing 30 store-bought cupcakes. The office staff – with plenty of other things to do – sends an email or leaves a voice message for the child’s teacher, who then sends the child down to office to pick up the cupcakes. Unless the message doesn’t get through; in which case the office has to resort to the intercom. The cupcakes then live in the classroom until the teacher finds time to have the “party.” In my room I hold off as long as possible. I typically have the birthday kid stay inside when the rest of the class goes out to recess at 2:50 so they can put a cupcake and a napkin on everyone’s desk. When recess is over and everyone comes back inside, I take my guitar off the wall and we sing the standard. Then we eat cupcakes. After five minutes we throw away the wrappers, wear the rings that are usually embedded in the frosting (Seahawk helmets or Disney princesses) and get on with what’s left of our day.

Now obviously that’s not a huge distraction. But that’s a typical birthday. I’ve had misguided parents drop off a standard round cake with candles (seriously?) and no plates. I’ve had parents bring in jugs of juice and no cups. I had one dad drop off 24 cupcakes for a class of 29, five of whom received a ballpoint pen stolen from the supply room. And then there are the parents whose child is too special for mere cupcakes. They bring cupcakes and balloons. Or cupcakes, juice and balloons. Or sometimes an entire pizza lunch for the whole class, complete with cookies, drinks and favor bags. And if you think these parties are distracting for a classroom, imagine what it’s like in the office; five hundred students means there’s an average of 1.5 birthdays each day – more on Mondays and Fridays to account for the kids who were thoughtless enough to have a weekend birthday this year – and you can see how much time is consumed by birthday logistics.

Besides the distraction, birthday treats are usually horribly unhealthy. I challenge you to find something worse for a child’s body than the average store-bought cupcake. And frankly, there are a lot of kids in school right now who need to take nutrition a lot more seriously. When I first started teaching, 30 years ago, I would typically have one or two chunky students per class. This year nearly half my class appeared to be overweight. No, we’re not going to turn the corner on childhood obesity by banning birthday cupcakes, but trust me, we need to start somewhere.

And that’s not even taking into account the kids with allergies or diabetes. I usually have a handful of students each year who are allergic to anything from wheat to milk, chocolate, dairy products, or nuts. The data is readily available, but it’s time-consuming for me to figure out who can’t eat these particular cupcakes, and it’s heart-breaking for the allergic kid to be told that he’s going to have to miss out on the treats.

That said, part of me will always miss those birthday cupcakes. But that part of me is – quite frankly – a little too large as it is. It’s time to ban the cupcakes and move on.

SBAC Reflections, Part 1

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Assessment, Elementary

Ccss-sbacBy Tom

Like most kids across the state, my students are in the middle of taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment, known in our school as the “S-Back.” It has been what I’ll politely call a “Learning Experience.” Most of us are used to giving paper-pencil standardized tests, and it’s stressful enough managing those; which entails keeping track of every single test, sharpening and distributing number 2 pencils, passing out the snacks, keeping the room silent, keeping the “fast finishers” busy with activities that are engaging enough to keep them quiet, yet not engaging enough to encourage the other kids to rush through their tests. With the SBAC, we have to deal with all that, plus the added stress of logging onto the SBAC Assessment Management Portal to generate an “Event Code,” getting a computer into the hands of every student, helping them log on using their 18-digit security code and the teacher-generated Event Code, and then helping them navigate into and through the test itself. As I told my wife, “Thank God for bourbon and thank God this year is only a field test.”

Three days removed from the stress and the hassle, I think I can safely draw three conclusions about these tests and the impact they’ll have on education in our state.

First of all, literacy will become even more integrated. Secondary teachers already teach reading and writing in the same period, but in the early grades, this is less the case, especially when teachers start getting serious about getting their kids ready for the state tests. The SBAC tests student’s writing skills by giving them a performance task which close reading of a series of texts and a response with an essay composed completely on the computer. Obviously we’ve always used student writing as a means to gauge their reading comprehension, but not when it comes to standardized assessments; in years past, the writing part of the test has been completely separate from the reading test and has had prompts that require very little reading skill. With the SBAC, there is no reading and writing assessment; it’s all one big ELA assessment, and the whole thing happens on a computer screen.

Which brings me to my second conclusion: students will be using technology a lot more for core curriculum activities. No more will teachers have their students draft, revise, edit and publish predominately on paper and use technology for stuff like social studies PowerPoint slideshows. To be successful on the SBAC, students need to know how to navigate between reading and writing panes on their computer screen. They’ll need to know how to compose from scratch electronically. And obviously they’ll need to know how to type. One of the things that amazed me last week was how many computers appeared out of the woodwork when it was time for those tests. That was great, but we’re going to need those machines all day, every day, in pretty much every classroom, if we want success. (And trust me; with the increased emphasis on results-based teacher and principal evaluations, we will want success.)

Of course, as everyone knows, simply placing computers into a classroom won’t cut it. Teachers are simply going to have to become proficient users of technology. We’ll need to know how to provide instruction with technology, present practice work using technology, help our students do that work on computers and then read, score and publish their work without ever having to print it out. Sure, there will still be paper, but increasingly there will be lots of web pages and word documents. For younger teachers that might not seem like a big deal, but for a guy like me, who started teaching when overhead projectors were cutting edge, that represents a significant evolution.

These changes and more are predicated on the idea that “what gets tested is what gets taught,” which is pretty much the way thing happen in education. Obviously the SBAC will get refined and improved after the results of this pilot year are analyzed, but I think it’s safe to say that we’re in for some major changes.

Next week, after my kids take the math portion, I’ll share my reflections and that side of the curriculum.

TPEP Reflections

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Assessment, Education Policy

Tpep-logoBy Tom

Last week I had my final evaluation conference with my principal. I volunteered to do a comprehensive evaluation this year, so it was a long one. And it went well. Now that I’ve had a week to reflect on the whole affair I’ve come up with three conclusions.

First of all, TPEP is a lot better than what we had before. I’m not sure how your district used to do teacher evaluations, but in my district it was a joke. We basically chose our own goals, as well as the evidence by which we would be assessed on those goals. We then collected that evidence and presented it to our principals. It was essentially impossible to fail, as long as you chose a goal that you knew you could achieve, which everyone did.

With TPEP, we’re measured by standards. We have to show that our teaching lines up to best practices. My district uses the Danielson Framework, which is fairly easy to comprehend and seems to spell out pretty much everything a competent teacher should do. Principals now have standards against which to measure teacher performance. Like I said, TPEP is a lot better than what it replaced.

Secondly, TPEP is a lot of work – for principals. My principal spends an average of fifteen hours per week on TPEP-related activities. That’s a lot of time, which begs the obvious question: What is he not doing? What he’s not doing is working with students, talking with parents, eating, sleeping and spending time with his family. We have a part-time dean of students, which helps us here at school, but I worry about the man’s private life. I’m sure the legislature didn’t intend to completely overburden people who were already completely overburdened, but they did.

And that brings me to my third conclusion. Let’s remember that the main purpose for the creation of TPEP was to make it easier to fire ineffective teachers. But at this point I’m not sure TPEP will actually achieve that goal. Consider a situation that I’m aware of: A teacher is ineffective in nearly every aspect of his job. The classroom is disorganized and unsafe. Learning is barely happening. Yet this guy somehow manages to pull it together for both of the required principal observations and is able to document some student growth over the course of the year. What happens?

Not much. According to TPEP, this teacher will probably keep on teaching, for two reasons. First of all, his overall scores won’t look that bad; at least not bad enough for dismissal. Secondly, in order to document just how incompetent this teacher is, the principal would need to spend a ton of time observing and meeting with him. Time that he doesn’t have. The irony of TPEP is that it demands so much of a principal’s time that he doesn’t have any time to fire bad teachers, which was the whole purpose of TPEP in the first place.

TPEP is new. Everything that’s new has glitches. I’m confident that in a few years we’ll work them out.

Washington Loses NCLB Waiver

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Deathmobile1By Tom

There’s a good reason why they don’t make movies about quiet, level-headed subordination: people would rather watch a group of oppressed college students stand up to authority and go down fighting in a blaze of rowdy mayhem than watch those same kids curb their excesses, buckle down and apply themselves to their studies.

Likewise, when the federal government applies pressure to a state in order to force compliance to an education agenda with which that state disagrees, the natural impulse is to stand up for our integrity and accept whatever consequences might follow.

And that’s exactly what happened in Washington. Arne Duncan followed through on his threat to withdraw our waiver from NCLB because our legislature didn’t mandate the use of standardized test scores in our teacher evaluation system. We stood up to our oppressor and lost. And now we face the consequences.

Here’s what that looks like in my fourth grade classroom. I have a student named Lamar who began the year reading seven words a minute. He struggled with basic addition facts. He had no idea how to write a sentence and his behavior was keeping himself and his classmates from learning.

Lamar now reads 70 words per minute. He can solve long division problems and add fractions. Last week he wrote a story with a credible main character, a clear setting and a cohesive plot. His behavior isn’t perfect, but it no longer compromises his learning.

Although I would love to claim credit for this turnaround, I can’t. Lamar gets thirty minutes of extra help for reading fluency every morning; he meets with a small group for reading comprehension and writing skills; he has a ten-minute meeting every day with a para-educator to go over his behavior and study skills; he meets with a math specialist for 45 minutes every afternoon. In other words, Lamar gets as much support as our school can possibly throw his way.

The reason we’re able to do this is that our school qualifies for Title 1 funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. When our state was granted a waiver from NCLB, the previous restrictions for how that money was spent were removed. Consequently, our school was free to spend money on kids like Lamar as we saw fit.

And it’s working.

But now that waiver has been replaced and Title 1 money comes with a lot of strings. Instead of paying for learning support and para-educator time, we now have to spend part of that money for teacher training and private tutoring. With all due respect to teacher trainers and private tutors, I doubt Lamar will benefit from either one as much as he’s benefiting from his current program.

I like standing up to authority and sticking it to the man as much as the next guy. But I’d much rather see Lamar grow up to be the first person in his family to go to college. And when he gets there, I’d like him go a little crazy and make a few mistakes; and then learn from those mistakes, buckle down, finish school and become a quiet, level-headed family man.

But that just got a little harder.

Receiving Feedback

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B Dealing_with_negative_feedback3y Tom

I was listening to NPR this morning and there was an interview with the authors of Thanks for the Feedback, the Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. I immediately thought of TPEP, since all of us are about to receive the most comprehensive dose of feedback on our teaching than we’ve had in a long, long time. For me it’s been decades since I’ve had a serious conversation with my principal about what I’m doing well and how I can improve as a teacher. The authors of the book, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, made the point that in the overall scheme of things, the act of receiving feedback is probably more important that the act of giving it. When it comes to TPEP, I completely agree. Much has been made of the role principals play in our new evaluation system. But there’s been little attention paid to our role, as consumers of the feedback.

Feedback, of course, comes in two forms: positive and negative. Most of us have no trouble receiving positive feedback; it’s the negative kind that causes problems. Negative feedback is another term for criticism, and even when it’s “constructive,” it’s still painful. Stone and Heen point out that there’s a paradox surrounding criticism: on the one hand, humans have the need for approval; we want others to think well of us. On the other hand, most of us have a desire to constantly improve at what we do. So while criticism can be used for improvement, which we like, it also makes it clear that someone doesn’t completely approve of what we’re doing, which we don’t like.

Since we’re about to get a hearty helping of constructive feedback, let me make the following suggestions:

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I (Sort Of) Support Initiative 1351

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ClassroomInSanAntonio_jpg_800x1000_q100By Tom

By now you’ve probably heard that there’s a campaign afoot to gather signatures for Initiative 1351, which, if passed, would significantly lower class sizes in Washington State. The campaign to get the initiative on the ballot is sponsored by Class Size Counts, an organization whose name pretty much sums up their mission. But the campaign picked up most of its steam last month at the WEA Representative Assembly when the delegates voted to support it.

This initiative would mandate class sizes of 17 for primary grades and 24 for fourth grade on up. High-poverty schools would have class sizes of 15 and 23.

All of this sounds great, of course, except for the issue of money. 1351 would put half of the financial burden on the state and the other half on local districts. And that financial burden is definitely not nothing.

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New Study: Teachers Who Pass ProTeach are better than Those Who Don’t

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Assessment, Education Policy

Cedar leavesBy Tom

A new study commissioned by Washington’s Professional Educator Standards Board shows that ProTeach – our teacher licensing assessment – seems to contribute to an increase in student learning. The study was conducted by UW Bothell’s Center for Education Data and Research (CEDR). It was a complicated study, but essentially they compared teachers who passed ProTeach with those who didn’t by looking at their students’ test scores using Value Added Models (VAM).

The main conclusion reached by CEDR is that teachers who passed ProTeach correlate to higher student test scores, especially in reading. Not so much in math. It's worth noting that this is essentially the same conclusion they drew conducting a similar study on teachers who earned National Board Certification. The study also found the effect was greatest for those teachers who scored high on Entry 2; the one that concerns classroom management and family communication. I found that interesting; it seems more likely that Entry 3 – which is all about teaching and assessment – would be the one more closes associated with higher test scores. I guess that goes to show how important classroom management is. Overall, the results seem to indicate that ProTeach is an effective measurement of teacher quality, which must make the PESB feel relieved.

Of course, we can also look at these results from another direction. Maybe they indicate that VAM is a valid measurement, at least for reading instruction. Personally I found the entire report a little presumptuous; strongly implying that VAM is the gold standard and that teacher performance assessments like ProTeach are valid to the extent they correlate with student performance assessments like VAM. I may be biased (I’ve never been a big fan of VAM), but I place a lot more credence on an evaluation that focuses on what teachers are actually doing when they teach than an evaluation that looks at student performance, which is effected by a myriad of factors that include teacher quality. So perhaps the fact that VAM results and ProTeach results are correlated might show that VAM is legitimate. At least in reading instruction.

In a larger context, it seems to me that if there’s a place for VAM, then this is surely it; used on aggregated data like in this study. Where VAM is not appropriate is when it’s used on individual classrooms and individual teachers. That’s a complete travesty. It’s also a shame, because advanced statistical analyses – like VAM – can be invaluable when it comes to showing which instructional practices are effective and which aren’t. And I’m here to tell you: teachers across the country who are evaluated using VAM hate it with a passion you don’t often see in education. If we manage to steer clear from that mistake in Washington, I can see the day when TPEP reaches maturity and we have a large database of teacher evaluations and researchers like the folks over at CEDR can use metrics like VAM to help us understand which teacher practices are most effective.

But for now, we’ll have to settle for what we have: a somewhat obvious conclusion that tells us that good teachers produce good students. 

Reflections on Teacher Leadership

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123280454227616203596_washmonBy Tom

I spent last week in Washington DC. For three days I worked with an amazing group of teachers redesigning Jump Start, the WEA’s National Board Certification candidate training program. We were holed up in a conference room at NEA headquarters working with their staff along with staff from the National Board. And we ended up with a product that will definitely help National Board candidates understand the new assessment process and make their way through certification.

I also spent two days at the National Board conference. Between breakout sessions and keynote addresses, I heard a lot about teacher leadership. Two speakers in particular seemed to epitomize the opposite poles of what that concept actually means. Arne Duncan spoke about teacher leadership and the subtext seemed to be that teacher leaders are those who help administrators execute their decisions. They’re the ones who lead the workshops on the Common Core and the new evaluation systems. Tony Wagner also spoke about teacher leadership. But his definition seemed to give teachers authority over actual education policy. Teachers should be involved in continual reexamination of what we teach, how we teach it and how we should be assessed.

Personally I think they’re both right. Teacher leaders should have a voice in policy decision and have a hand in executing those decisions. Unfortunately, however, I think our voices have been stifled and our hands held back. Why?

Three reasons:

One of the ironies of teacher leadership is the fact that teaching itself gets in the way. First of all, most of us are too exhausted at the end of the day to do much more than eat dinner and plan the next day’s lessons. Being a leader takes energy. Energy and time. Teaching uses up both of those things. Besides that, teaching is generally more fun than leadership. Given the choice, I would much rather spend a day working with my fourth graders than working with colleagues. It’s not that I don’t like working with adults; I just like working with kids better. They’re more fun. When I get opportunities to take on leadership roles, I frequently turn them down if they conflict with my teaching schedule simply because I would rather be teaching.

Another barrier to teacher leadership is that many teachers have a lack of confidence in their ability to lead. Of course, sometimes a lack of confidence is justified. I have no confidence, for example, in my ability to pole vault because I’ve never done it before and it looks complicated. Teaching and leading require two fairly distinct skill sets. That’s not to say that a person couldn’t do both; but being a good teacher doesn’t necessarily make you a good leader. But a person who has learned to be a good teacher can certainly learn to be a good leader.

And finally, there’s failure. Sooner or later, a teacher leader will encounter it. It’s certainly happened to me. I’ve fought hard to get my district to adopt a particular policy only to have them turn it down. The natural impulse is always to throw in the towel, go back to my classroom where I know I can find success and forget about trying to change anything. Forget about trying to lead.

That attitude, of course, is exactly what we need to reject. We also need to get over our lack of confidence in our capacity to lead, either by learning the necessary skills or by finding a leadership niche that fits with the skills we already have. The hardest barrier, at least for me, is finding the time and energy to lead. But it can be done. It has to be done. Because if thirty years in the classroom has taught me anything, it’s that teachers need to be both in and out of the classroom in order for anyone to be successful in the classroom.

Inslee Fought The Law and The Law Won

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education Policy

DownloadBy Tom

I was at a staff meeting once in which a colleague made a presentation. She wanted us to take on some new initiative. I can’t remember what it was, since we voted not to do it. She came to me afterwards and asked what she did wrong. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “You were clear and articulate. You explained what the program was about and told us why it was a good idea. Then we thought about it and decided not to do it. That happens sometimes.”

I tell this dull story because it sounds like what happened in Washington D.C. last weekend. Governor Inslee went out there and explained to Education Secretary Arne Duncan why our teacher evaluation system should be good enough to obtain the NCLB waiver, even though it clearly doesn’t require the use of state tests like the feds want. Governor Inslee, I’m sure, was every bit as clear and articulate as my colleague, yet in the end Duncan said no.

That happens sometimes.

So now what? So now Inslee is going to help the legislature pass a bill that will change TPEP in a way that the feds like. And then we’ll get our waiver, which will allow the state more freedom to spend $40 or so million dollars. And we also won’t have to send home letters to our parents telling them that our schools are bad.

And as for us? The teachers in the classroom? We get to use state tests to measure student growth. Of course by “we” I mean the 16% of us who actually teach in state tested grades and subjects. Everyone else gets to use meaningful assessments that reflect what they actually teach every day.

Personally, I’m trying really hard to get upset about this. Really hard. But all I can muster is a sense of disappointed resignation. Sure, our new evaluation system is damaged, but the damage is only to those of us who teach state-tested students, and since the student growth part of our evaluations are supposed to use “multiple measures,” state assessments will only matter to a slight degree to a small number of teachers. And there’s yet another caveat: we’re switching to a new student assessment system. This year is the field test. Next year is the first year; the year we gather base-line data. The year after that is the first year in which we could actually misuse the assessment for teacher evaluations, and since CCSS promises to be the essence of professional development for the foreseeable future, there’s every reason to expect student test scores to rise, at least in the short-term.

While I would like to see a way around using student test scores for teacher evaluation, what I would love to see is a reasonable, rational US Congress completely rewrite ESEA, better known as NCLB. Remember, all the nonsense we’re going through right now is an effort to secure a waiver from the onerous sanctions of that ridiculous law. ESEA, as it was originally conceived decades ago, was designed to provide support for our country’s high-needs students. If Congress could set aside their bickering long enough to write a law that actually did that, we wouldn’t have to worry about all this crap.

Dream on, Tom.

NEA President is Concerned about Common Core Implementation

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Professional Development

070309 Petco 2By Tom

As you may have heard, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel had some sharp words to say about the rollout of the CCSS. He called the implementation “completely botched.” His assessment is apparently based on feedback he’s received from NEA members over the past year. There’s no way to interpret this as anything other than a major blow to proponents of the Common Core. The NEA – our nation’s biggest teacher organization – has been one of the strongest supporters of nation-wide standards and has consistently pledged to use classroom teachers as “ambassadors” to spread support for CCSS.

I certainly can’t speak for all NEA members, but I can speak for myself. When I first started teaching, thirty years ago, standards were effectively hidden; curriculum companies seemed to know what students should know and be able to do at each grade level and they used that information to write and publish textbooks. Teachers were simply consumers; we used what they wrote and didn’t ask too many questions.

There was an attempt in the early 90s to create a common national set of standards, but it was defeated by conservatives who argued for local control over education. Each state subsequently began to write and implement its own educational standards.

Then came 2001. With NCLB, our lawmakers decided that every school had to get every kid “up to standard” within twelve years, something not even Finland could ever achieve. Making it even more ridiculous was the fact that by that time every state had its own standards and assessments. Actually, some states didn’t even have standardized assessments.  

As the sanctions required by NCLB began to loom large, Obama became president. He decided to use the threat of those sanctions as leverage for his own reform agenda, which included the Common Core. Not surprisingly, 45 states and DC signed on, partly because they liked the standards, but partly because they wanted a waiver from NCLB sanctions.

As a teacher, I embrace the standards from an instructional perspective. The standards themselves make sense; they’re narrower and deeper and for the most part seem developmentally appropriate, at least from my perspective. But what really appeals to me is the fact that they’re (mostly) national standards. Not only will curriculum publishers have more consistent targets, but it opens the door for collaborating at a scale never imagined before.  

But with the standards came the assessments. When I first started scrolling through the fourth grade SBAC language arts assessment, I remember thinking, “Wow, this will be challenging for my students. But I’m sure there will be support and with that support I’ll be able to get my kids to achieve something remarkable.” And in my state and my district, that support has started to materialize. We’re focusing on CCSS-related instruction in district professional development time, and I hooked up with an awesome training in an instructional model called Literacy Design Collaborative.

But there’s a problem. The implementation of Common Core and its attendant assessments are unfortunately occurring while teacher evaluation is undergoing a major shift. Teachers are, for the first time, being assessed in part on the basis of student growth; student growth which is – or soon will be – measured by brand-new assessments based on a brand-new set of standards.

Teachers are, quite predictably, freaking out over all this. It’s one thing to change the standards and the tests used to measure those standards. It’s another thing altogether to use those tests for teacher evaluations before teachers have a chance to fully delve into those standards and understand what the assessments are actually demanding from our students.

That’s exactly why Dennis Van Roekel is calling for a “course correction.” It’s a simple request to slow things down to a manageable pace. Let us get to know the standards. Let us understand the tests. And then, down the road, maybe we can use those tests as part of teacher evaluation. Or maybe not. But to press on both fronts right now is counter-productive. The only way to ever successfully implement the Common Core is to get teacher buy-in.

And the only way to insure that the Common Core is not successfully implemented is to alienate those same teachers. And that seems to be what’s happening.