Title IX at 40!

I have written fairly extensively about Title IX and women's athletics, so I was very excited to see this come into my email inbox:

The Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy (SHARP) Center for Women and Girls is hosting the premier national conference commemorating the 40^th birthday of Title IX, May 9-May 11 in Ann Arbor.  Renowned athletes, policymakers and researchers are presenting at Title IX at 40. The goal of Title IX at 40 to take stock of the progress that has been made since Title IX and determine what gaps still exist as well as how to close them. The SHARP Center is a new strategic partnership between the University of Michigan (UM) and the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF: a non-profit started by Billie Jean King in 1974 to advance sport and physical activity for women and girls). Our mission is to advance research and policymaking to enhance the lives of women and girls through sport, play, and movement.

You can review the program at http://irwg.research.umich.edu/pdf/IXprogram.pdf (There is a minimal conference fee.) There will be famous speakers, like Laila Ali (boxing champion), Donna de Varona (Olympic Swimmer) but also interesting sessions reviewing the progress Title IX has made and to identify key priorities for the future. People can also get CEUs for attending the conference.

Arne Duncan & Co. visit Ann Arbor, New Tech

Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education, is on a Midwest tour. He'll be visiting Ann Arbor on Thursday, September 8th, 2011. 

As this note from Dean of the School of Education Deborah Ball states,

He, along with a faculty panel, will discuss ways to promote excellence in America's classrooms, particularly for underserved students, and the roles for different sectors—e.g., the Federal government, states, higher education, entrepreneurs—in leveraging effective improvement. This moderated discussion will be followed by plenty of time for Q&A from the audience.
The event will take place in the Prechter Laboratory (room 2202) from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. I hope you will come to hear from and share your thoughts with this important national education leader. Space will be limited, so please arrive early. (Emphases added.)

The good news is, this is open to the public! The Prechter Laboratory is in the School of Education building, 610 E. University, Ann Arbor. If you go, please share with Secretary Duncan your feelings about using tests as a primary means to assess children and teachers; about the failures of No Child Left Behind; about small class sizes; about supporting teachers. Tell him what you think about his version of "educational reform." And if you go, I would love it if you would write about the experience in the comments.

                                                             *          *           *

Meanwhile, on the other side of our county (just a few miles away, really), his senior advisor--Greg Darnieder--will be visiting Ypsilanti's New Tech High School, which is housed in the former Ardis Elementary building. According to the Ypsilanti Schools press release,

In July 2011, the Ypsilanti New Tech @ Ardis site received National Demonstration Site Status—based on its high fidelity of implementation—making it eligible to host national attendees for Executive Tours for the New Tech Network, a non-profit organization that works with schools and communities to implement innovative high schools.

I understand that the state's Superintendent of Schools, Michael Flanagan, will also be at New Tech, along with several other dignitaries. 

If you are there, I'd encourage you to share your thoughts with the Superintendent of Schools and with Arne Duncan's senior advisor.

John Dewey: Great Philosopher. Great Teacher?

If you spend any time at all in education school--which I did--you will surely end up reading something of John Dewey's. He was a great educational philosopher, and his works feel timeless when you read them.

[Want to try something of his that is relatively short, and eminently readable? Try Experience and Education, published in 1938, and coming in under 100 pages. It feels like Dewey could have written it in the last few years.]

But I've been thinking about what makes a good teacher, and what makes a bad teacher. Therefore, I was extremely interested to find an article about John Dewey--who was actually a teacher at the University of Michigan--and even more (delightedly) surprised to find that it tries to answer the question: was Dewey a good teacher?

John Dewey in the 1880s

In 1998, Brian Williams wrote an article for the Bentley Historical Society (Bulletin No. 44, July 1998), Thought and Action: John Dewey at the University of Michigan.

John Dewey started out as a high school teacher, and as happens with so many school teachers, he decided that it wasn't for him.

Following graduation he embarked on a brief teaching career at the high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania. But his true interest was philosophy, and in 1881, he left Pennsylvania after arranging for a year of private study with his philosophy instructor at the University of Vermont. This period of study prompted Dewey to enroll as a graduate student in the philosophy department at Johns Hopkins University in 1882.  (p. 5)

Dewey was on the faculty of the Philosophy Department for most of the time period of 1884-1894, leaving for the University of Minnesota for a short while. He left and went to the University of Chicago, where he was able to found the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in 1896. (Yes, when they lived in Chicago, the Obama girls went to the Lab School.)

According to the article, Dewey came to Michigan at a time of change in educational methods.

The seminar method of teaching, introduced earlier at Michigan, was increasingly employed as a means of instruction, and students were offered a wider selection of elective courses to choose from and greater voice and freedom within the curriculum. The classical curriculum was giving way to the scientific curriculum, and chapel services, which previously had been mandatory, became voluntary, a nod to an increasingly secular society. Admission requirements were changing as well. Students from accredited high schools were now allowed to enroll on the strength of their diplomas rather than through the traditional formal entrance examinations, a move that dramatically altered the means by which students gained access to education. (pp. 3-4)

 Dewey wrote curricula.

Together, Dewey and Morris overhauled the Department of Philosophy, making it one of the leading centers of German scientific philosophy. They also established the modern foundations of psychology instruction at Michigan. (p. 5)

He accredited schools and evaluated teachers, including Ypsilanti High School.

Although Dewey was not formally affiliated with the pedagogical department, which held the departmental designation of the Science and the Art of Teaching, he was deeply interested in educational issues. He took an active role in high school accreditation visits and helped to found the Michigan Schoolmasters’ Club, an organization that united college-level instructors with their high school counterparts. The fact that Michigan was the first American college or university to create a permanent chair in education, in 1879, was not lost on Dewey.  (p. 15)

Dewey’s reports are flavored by his experience as a high school teacher and are suggestive of his future writing on education and schools. In June 1888, he inspected the high school in Ypsilanti, Michigan, visiting several classes and observing the instruction and the response of the students. His observations of the instruction in Greek are particularly insightful: “Mr. Hopkins’ methods are somewhat slow and at times tedious, and he spends much time on points rather finer than the average high school teacher devotes himself to; but the slowness does not arise from any lack of interest as he is personally enthusiastic about his subjects. While the class’s attention would at times be held better by less detailed attention to minutiae, I am bound to say that I thought Mr. Hopkins’ work if judged by results was more than ordinarily effective. The students upon the whole, were accurate and thorough in their work.” (p. 18, emphasis added)

 About a high school in Corunna, Michigan, he had this to say:

Dewey’s report on Corunna noted that there were two teachers, one he rated “medium or below” and the other “fair.” He went on to record that the school was “rather demoralized” and “altogether too large for two teachers.” He discussed his findings with members of the school board and related his impression of the superintendent as “straight forward and well meaning but not very energetic.” Observations made by Dewey during these inspection visits become significant when viewed in the context of the importance he placed on schools and education as instruments of change. (p. 18, emphasis added)

 But was Dewey himself a good teacher?
As it says on Facebook about some relationships--"It's complicated."

As with so many teachers, there was a lack of unanimity. Those who said yes, said:

Throughout his lifetime Dewey was known as a rather shy and unassuming man. His manner won him praise in the classroom. In 1890, an anonymous writer for the student newspaper the Chronicle, described Dewey as “modest and retiring” but noted that his “method of instruction is excellent” and he “is one of the most popular, most satisfactory class room lecturers in the University.” The writer went on to praise Dewey’s “easy, earnest and unconscious manner before a class” and the “utter lack of any spirit of pedantry.” In his classroom, Dewey fostered a sense of equality with his students and was praised for placing a “higher premium upon a single attempt at original, intelligent thought than upon the parrot- like repetition of whole volumes of other men’s thoughts.”56 William Warner Bishop, a former student and later librarian of the University of Michigan, writing over fifty years after being a student under Dewey, favorably recalled, “He was by far the ablest lecturer under whom I have studied; never dictating, he was clear and unmistakable in expression. You could get the whole of his talk, in contrast to the very little one often received from speakers who were more fluent.” (pp. 22-23)

 Those who said no, said:

An anonymous author in the student annual the Oracle offered some “specimen definitions” from the “Sophster’s New Dictionary.” One of the definitions read “Dew(e)y.- Adj. Cold, impersonal, psychological, sphinx-like, anomalous and petrifying to flunkers.” Student publications contain several sarcastic jabs at Dewey and the deep and heavy nature of some of his courses. His courses in psychology prompted a twelve-line poem in the Michigan Argonaut about “a girl who died Taking Dewey’s Psychology.” (p. 23, emphasis added)

Psychology

O what is the matter with you, lank girl,

A pale and wild and haggard she,

Oh, don't you know, the old man said,

She's taking Dewey's Psychology.

Once she was fair to look upon,

Fair as a morning in June was she,

And now the wreck you see to-day

Is caused by Dewey's Psychology.

A year had passed, again I strayed

By the Medic's hall; what did I see

But some whitened bones of a girl who died

Taking Dewey's Psychology.

Poem about Dewey's psychology course appearing in the student paper Michigan Argonaut, Vol. 7, No. 6, November 10, 1888. Taken from Thought and Action: John Dewey at the University of Michigan (1998)

With this nuanced view, I think you get an idea of what makes teacher evaluation so difficult. What, exactly, do you value?

Local Boy Makes Good In A Very Big Education Fishbowl

I spent this past weekend in the New York area.
I was shocked to see the name of someone that I actually had met more than once running across the trailer at the bottom of the screen on ABC News. Truthfully, that doesn't happen all that often.

And I was so very, very interested to read this article in the New York Times:
Mayor and State Reach Deal On A Schools Chief.

If you've been following this issue at all, you know that New York City is a huge, urban school district. In fact, it is the largest public school district in the world, and the school chief is appointed by the mayor. And Mayor Bloomberg has just appointed Cathleen Black, who has absolutely no education background, to be chancellor. Not only that, but she never even attended a public school. Read about the requirements for the New York City chancellor--this requires a waiver, which has just been given.

[The idea is, I believe, that schools can be run like businesses. I don't believe they can--first, because kids are not a product or service, and second--perhaps more importantly--because in a for-profit business you can try to control both your income and your expenses, and in the non-profit education world, you typically only get to control your expenses. But I digress.]

So anyway, to pacify the people who are outraged that she would be chosen (because there was a possibility that the New York State Education Commissioner could veto her appointment), Mayor Bloomberg suggests a compromise. . . a number 2, a deputy chancellor, who actually knows something about education.

And this is where the "local boy makes good" part comes in, and this is why I was so interested in the article. The local boy is Shael Polakow-Suransky, who got his high school education at the fine local institution, Ann Arbor's own Community High School. He also has the distinction of having a mother, Valerie Polakow, who is a professor of Teacher Education at Eastern Michigan University; and a father, Leonard Suransky, with a PhD from the University of Michigan who is a professor in the Netherlands.

Reviews of Polakow-Suransky's work from the education community in the New York area seem to be pretty positive. (See Gothamschools.org for an example.) The real question of NYC activists, though, is whether Polakow-Suransky will have any power at all.

That is likely because the New York Daily News reports Mayor Bloomberg responding to this question:

Q: How much autonomy will the chief academic officer have?
A: I think it'd be inappropriate to speak while we're waiting for the. . .  for David Steiner to act but there will be one person in charge. Make no mistake about that.

I like what Gothamschools.org quotes Polakow-Suransky as saying:

At a recent panel on how federal education policy is affecting local school districts, Suransky described his interest in standardized tests as being rooted in everyday teaching:

[U]ltimately the reason for assessment is to motivate what happens in the classroom. If it doesn’t actually lead to good practice in the classroom then it’s undermining practice in the classroom. And so this is an opportunity. This is a moment where there’s an opportunity to shift the direction of practice in the classroom and to push on the level of rigor and to actually figure out what is it that kids and teachers need in order to engage in that type of practice. (Emphasis added.)

It's not really a side note to say that I also had lunch with a few friends whose children are making their way through the NYC public schools. Suffice it to say that ensuring that your children get into the "good" schools might require that you yourself have an advanced degree. For high school, there is a huge book of school choices--which you get to wade through and rank order. . . and if your grades weren't good in 7th grade, you may have ruined many of your chances. . . if your test scores were poor, you can forget a different set of schools.

It's also not a side note to say that I'm sure Shael is influenced in the way that he thinks by his parents' work--in particular, Valerie Polakow's work on children and poverty. As it states in her biography on the EMU web site:

My scholarship is dedicated to advocacy on behalf of women and children in poverty, and in my writings I have attempted to document the lived realities of those who have been shut out— from early childhood education, from K-12 education, and from post-secondary education; and to give voice to those whose rights have been violated by poverty, race and gender discrimination.

In fact, Valerie Polakow is the co-editor of a journal I had never seen prior to looking up her biography. It is called PowerPlay: A Journal of Educational Justice and it looks interesting. [See, for instance, the lead article in the most recent issue: The Persistent Issue of Disproportionality in Special Education and Why It Hasn't Gone Away. And that topic is very related to an earlier conversation--see the comments section--on Ann Arbor Schools Musings.]

So, I admit, I was curious to see what someone I had met when he was a teenager looks like now.

Answer: he has a lot less hair!  In any case--good luck Shael!

Evaluation, Part II: The World Languages Partnership

Three weeks ago, I promised a second post about evaluation. The first post can be found here. I said at the time that I wanted to do this because the Ann Arbor schools are considering an alliance with UM for a "lab school," and since we already have a partnership program--the Ann Arbor Public Schools Languages Partnership--it is worth taking a look at how it is being evaluated, who is doing the evaluating, and what is being evaluated. This might offer some valuable insights for the future. As I wrote before,

The point of assessing the assessment is decidedly NOT to point fingers at what is not working, and it is NOT to praise what parts of the program are working. The point is to see what is being evaluated, who is doing the evaluation, and whether and/or how those things that need to be evaluated are being examined...

In other words: I am not evaluating the program itself. I am evaluating the evaluation process and product.

I've posted the documents, which I received from the district, on the web site Ann Arbor Area Government Document Repository, and this is the documents link. This is a very cool web site where people can post files they have acquired from local governmental units and make them widely available.

What I got was an assessment of third graders who had gone through the partnership program. There is a "CEFR grid," which lays out the broad, overarching goals of the program based on an internationally-recognized standard. There is a sample of the assessment tool that the students filled out.  And there is a summary of the students' assessments.

Was what was done, done appropriately? Done well?
For instance--is it appropriate to use the Common European Framework guidelines? Absolutely. That reflects an international standard for language learning.
Was the assessment the students filled out appropriate for third graders? I thought so! Take a look:

It seems age appropriate to me. Later on in the survery there were some places where students had an opportunity to write more. The summary document describes that 1,034 students were surveyed, and shares items such as "60% say they learned most of what was taught."

So--that's fine. It seems like an age-appropriate, large-scale survey of 3d graders.
There's only one problem, and that is that this survey is as far as it goes.

Although this is a fine assessment of how the students felt about learning Spanish, it is a terrible fail as far as assessing the Languages Partnership Program.

Let's remember that this is a new program. 
Before we expand it, isn't there more that we want to know?


NOTE: Since this was my written request, "Can you please send me copies of any evaluations that AAPS has done about the Ann Arbor Languages Partnership," I'm going to assume that what I got is all that there is at this point. It is certainly possible that there is other material out there.

On the academic side:
It's really nice that 60% of the students say they learned most of what was taught, but does any independent assessment--say, by their teachers--bear that out?
If some students are not learning, who are those students? 
Does this appear to decrease, or increase, the achievement gap?
It's really nice that a majority of students feel their teachers (who are for the most part, I believe, pre-student teachers) teach "very" or "pretty" well, but is there any other assessment of that? By university supervisors, AAPS mentors, or principals?
What about the students' regular teachers--do they feel that this program is value-added, or that it takes away from other activities? [I think this is important to know, as the program gets expanded.]
What about the school principals? Do they feel that this program is value-added? 
If school time is at a premium, and it is a zero-sum game, do we lose anything by adding Spanish? If so, what is it? If teaching a language is important, did we give enough time to it or should we give more time?
How much repetition should teachers be expected to do as we expand the program to fourth and then fifth grade? Will they be doing numbers and colors over and over again?
What did we do with students who already know Spanish from their homes? Were they classroom helpers? Were they given other things to do? How did that work?
Does it work to use pre-student teachers? 
What happened at the end of April when the UM winter term ended? Did the lessons end then?
Were the apprentice teachers responsive and responsible?
Were community members used, and if so, did that work well, or not? If not, what were the roadblocks?


On the financial side:
What was the original budget? Did we go over the budget? Under the budget?
Did either the University or AAPS have unexpected costs that they had to cover, and if so, what was the cost?
What lessons did we learn about the financing?
Is this program sustainable going forward?


On the partnership side:
Is the partnership working overall?
Were there any surprises? What were they?
What parts went smoothly and what parts did not?

And two more things...
First, from the A2LP web site:

While classes this year were taught in the Media Center at each school, and Media Specialists served as mentors for our ATs, in the 2010-2011 school year, classes will be held in students’ regular classrooms, with classroom teachers as mentors.

Under which setting do things seem to go more smoothly...in the media centers or in the classrooms? Do the classroom teachers feel prepared to be mentors for Spanish language apprentice teachers?

Second, from the A2LP web site:

Future research studies will include the perspectives of community members, whether or not they are parents of students participating in A2LP.  While many community members expressed their opinions at board meetings and in online discussion forums prior to the program’s start, the Partnership is interested in formally documenting the response to the program after several months/years of operation.

In fact, the A2LP brochure specifically states:

The Partnership will be advised by a community committee, which will be chaired by the Superintendent and the University’s Director of Teacher Education.

 But when I asked about the committee, I was told that:

There is not a committee as of yet. There is a plan to initiate the committee in the coming months. The main goal of the committee will be to help secure funding for professional development and promotion of the programs.

 Uh-Oh. As far as I'm concerned, that's a piece of the assessment that I can comment on: Fail. First of all, the program is a year-and-a-half in (if you include planning time, it's more), and there is no community committee yet. Second, the goal of the committee is no longer advising, but securing funding?

[It's no accident, I think, that I signed up for a committee during the budget forums last year, and have heard nary a word about them yet.]

On the AAPS web site, the Ann Arbor Languages Partnership program information is embedded in the World Languages page. There is a fuller description on the UM web site. The UM one closes with these words:

The program is the first of its kind in the School of Education and we want to ensure that its development is data-driven.

From the AAPS side, don't we absolutely agree? In order to make our work data-driven, our evaluations cannot simply be about students' assessments of themselves. They must be about the program operations as well, and they should be reflective in nature so that the partners know whether the program is working and/or financially sustainable, how well it is working, and what could be done to make it work better.

The Proof of the Pudding...

Is in the Eating.

That is the traditional text of the proverb that you may have heard shortened into, "The proof is in the pudding."

But either way, you probably could have figured out that what it means is that:

Results Matter.

And in the same way that one might try to improve pudding, we should be working to evaluate our school programs with an aim toward improving them.

Seriously, people DO work to improve their puddings! Just today I was reading the blog Kitchen Sin Carne, which has this little gem (no, we did not coordinate. . . and I even thought of the proverb before I saw the post!):

I've had various attempts this week on making vegan pudding. That's right. So first I tried chocolate pudding...FAIL. I tried it again, even more of a fail! Today I tried pumpkin pudding, and the first time it was so runny, and I tried to reduce it more and little pearls formed of like, cornstarch. I was really confused. Now in the fridge I have a little pumpkin 'pudding' but its more of a weird custard. Whatever. I'll try again!! I know I can do this!!

 So...where am I going with this? This is not really a food post. No, it's about language learning.

A couple of years ago, with big fanfare, the Ann Arbor schools announced that they would be working with U of M to get some Spanish language lessons into all of the third and fourth grade elementary school classes. To be specific, UM would provide the students to teach two 30-minute lessons a week to the third and fourth grades. Here is an annarbor.com article about the program launch. Here is the UM web site about the Ann Arbor Languages Partnership. 

At the time, I didn't say anything about this. I sort of thought it was a dumb idea because there is plenty of evidence that 60-minutes a week of a language, in isolation, is not going to teach anyone a language. Other countries actually teach kids languages by using daily instruction. On the other hand, I understood that the Burns Park PTO (a powerhouse fundraising group) was raising money to pay a foreign language teacher, which made some of the other schools want some foreign language lessons as well. So there was some internal pressure. I also thought that maybe any step forward in promoting second language acquisition could be a good thing.

Side note: the way second languages are taught in the Ann Arbor middle schools (6th-8th grade) has not been at all consistent from school to school, and it hasn't consistently promoted language learning either. In some schools, a program that gives you a "taste" of several languages has been promoted. How many languages can you count in, or say "pencil," "desk," and "teacher?" In others, it is "pick a language and stick with it."

Well, now this program has been in existence for a year. It is time to evaluate the program publicly.
"The proof of the pudding..."
Did the students learn a lot of Spanish? My guess is "no."
Did the UM students learn a lot? My guess is "yes."
Were parents satisfied?
I can't speak for all parents, but I do know that some parents were very satisfied...very happy...that their kids were getting some lessons in a second language. And guess what? NOW, they are pissed!

Q: What happens to Spanish language learning in fifth grade?
A: Nothing.

I don't know why 3d and 4th grade were chosen, but we have now instituted a program where students learn Spanish in 3d and 4th grade, nothing (second-language related) in 5th grade, and then in 6th grade either get some kind of exploratory language program or start taking a language which may or may not be Spanish. Does that make any sense at all? Not to me.

So let's look back now: why are we doing this? What outcomes would constitute success? Cui bono? Who benefits?

I don't know, because I haven't done or seen an evaluation (has one been done?), but I will conjecture that the beneficiaries, in this case, are the UM students--not the AAPS students.
It's not bad, by the way, for UM students to benefit. They just cannot be the only ones.
If in fact that is the case, then we [by "we" I mean AAPS parents, students, and taxpayers] need to be extra careful, in considering a "lab school" partnership, to make sure that the AAPS students benefit.