Career and College Ready

Queens City Councilman Rory Lancman is upset about college readiness rates in the city. He says that students graduate from high school at twice the rate of college readiness. And if you go strictly by the stats, he's absolutely right. If you read his argument, it's tough to find fault with it.

But if you look a little deeper, there is an issue, and that issue is how we define college readiness. The way we do it is via a combination of test grades. Here's a report from Reformy John King that likens college and career readiness to rating "proficient" on NAEP. Diane Ravitch argues that this is an absurd interpretation, the same one that the Reformy Waiting for Superman film used to berate public schools. Here's a more recent NY Regents report, full of Common Corey stuff.

Who determines who's college and career ready? Well, it's not really a who, but a what. It's based on test scores. Students who get so many points on this test and so many points on that are college and career ready. Students who get fewer points or fail this test are not. So if we want to make our students college and career ready, how can we do that?

It's pretty simple, actually. We test prep them. And as we all know, there's nothing more inspiring to teenagers than sitting around prepping for some test. That will certainly inspire them. They'll look forward to college and career, because they got to sit for hours in some classroom endlessly practicing exercises designed to show them how to pass one test.

Actually there are studies that show teacher grades are a better indication of college readiness. Unsurprisingly, students who do well with high school teachers tend to also do well with college teachers. Rory Lancman hasn't considered that, since he read somewhere that too many city students aren't college ready. In fact, a whole lot of people read articles like these and assume that students aren't college ready. And honestly, how many people follow closely enough to understand that college and career readiness are just a bunch of arbitrary test scores that some overpaid educrat dreamed up in some cozy office in Albany?

A problem with state exam scores is that they are wholly inconsistent and unreliable. One year it's the English Regents exam and the next it's the Common Core English exam. Which one is better and how do you prove it? Unfortunately, standardized tests are not really standardized as they're subject to whatever trendy nonsense comes into vogue. Next year maybe they'll drop the name Common Core and give the same test under a new name, pretending it's different. Or maybe they'll change a few things and say it's the same. Who knows?

Also the grades don't really mean a whole lot either. They are forever raising and lowering lines. One year they want everyone to pass so as to conclusively establish the genius of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The next they want everyone to fail so as to prove every teacher in New York sucks and needs to be fired. Who knows where the lines are this year? Who knows what they mean, particularly when coupled with the ever-evolving test, which Rory Lancman and readers of New York newspapers assume to be perfect no matter what?

There are issues with teacher grades now, too, unfortunately. I myself have attended meetings, the themes of which have largely revolved around how we could pass every student in every subject no matter what. I'm afraid I'm far from alone in this. Teachers understand messages, and not only subtle ones. We get when we're being hit over the head with a sledge hammer. We understand what it means when schools are closed for alleged failure.

If you consider the entire situation, it's very hard to say who is college and career ready. If anyone really cared, or really wanted to know, they'd empower teachers to do what's right and use their professional discretion. Of course, in New York State, that's out of the question. You see, the folks in Albany set cut scores up and down to make them appear any way they wish. That's fundamentally dishonest.

The thing about people who are fundamentally dishonest is they tend to believe the same is true of everyone. That's why they think we teachers are all too crooked to grade the state exams of our own students. As long as the crooks in Albany assume us to be pathological liars, no one's likely to attach any validity to the predictive nature of our grades.

But if anyone really wants to know how kids are doing, and how ready they are, they will empower teachers. The whole vilification thing really doesn't work for anyone at all.

When Chalkbeat Needs an "Expert," They Consult Students First NY

I am consistently amazed at what Chalkbeat regards as expert advice. Evidently, if you have enough cash to start an astroturf group, or if Bill Gates gives it to you, that's good enough for them. I found this tidbit in my email today, courtesy of Chalkbeat:

COLLEGE READY? City officials are hoping to ensure at least two-thirds of its graduates are "college ready" but experts disagree about how exactly readiness should be measured.

Wow. Who are they gonna ask? Aaron Pallas? Longtime principal Carol Burris? Ravitch herself? Here's the very first "expert" opinion Chalkbeat offers:

...StudentsFirstNY, in a report released last week, argues the city should include in its calculation students who don’t make it to graduation, which would knock the citywide rate down to just over one third.

Now that's very interesting. It's particularly interesting because I'm always reading about these amazing charter schools at which 100% of their grads go to four-year colleges. Incredible right? But what these stories don't say, ever, is precisely which percentage of the students who started these schools didn't finish. (That includes the ever-popular Dr. Steve Perry. I don't like to brag, but he recently banned me on Twitter because I retweeted something critical of him. How dare I?)
 I mean, if you start out with 100 kids, and 50 don't graduate your high school, doesn't that mean that half weren't college ready even if the other half ended up in 4-year colleges?

But I don't read these stories on Chalkbeat. I generally see them on Gary Rubinstein's blog. You see, while Gary is a full-time teacher at Stuyvesant and a father of small children, when he gets a story he doesn't just go to Students First NY and ask what they think about it.  He does research,  crunches the numbers, writes graphs and charts to make them accessible to folks like me who wouldn't understand otherwise, and presents a picture we wouldn't have otherwise.

Now in fairness, Chalkbeat also went to "Research Alliance for New York City Schools, a nonpartisan center based at New York University." 30 seconds of research revealed they were funded by Gates and Walmart. So you get both sides of the story at Chalkbeat. Reformy Students First NY, and a Gates funded entity that Chalkbeat calls "nonpartisan." We should take their word, right? (The fact that they didn't bother to label Students First as partisan should count for nothing, I suppose.) They also ask someone from Gates-funded "Achieve." So if you want a real spectrum of Gates-funded views, Chalkbeat is your go-to.

Also in fairness, they do acknowledge another view:

Yet some critics argue that test scores are not the best way to judge whether students are ready for college. Studies show that a student’s GPA is often a better predictor of success in college than his or her SAT scores, for example, though GPA isn’t standardized across schools.

You see that? "Some critics argue," they say, though they can't be bothered to cite a single one. And though it says "studies show," it doesn't mention who made them, or interview a single person who believes it. But then we resolve this issue.

Meanwhile, groups like StudentsFirstNY believe a metric that counts only graduates, rather than all students who start in ninth grade, artificially inflates the numbers.

Of course you have to not only give the last word to the astroturfers, but also fail again to mention they are partisan. Because journalistic standards. 

Though there are tens of thousands of teachers, though said teachers have a union, Chalkbeat New York could not be bothered asking them. Though Gary Rubinstein actually is an expert, and though he actually does research, they haven't bothered asking him either.

Chalkbeat NY's double standards are showing, and it appears they can't even be bothered to pretend anymore.

Is Reading the Magic Bullet?

Well, of course it isn't. There is no magic bullet. But here's a great piece from the New Yorker presenting the idea of reading as therapy, with a particular emphasis on fiction. I'm a great fan of fiction, and if left to my own devices, that's mostly what I will read. Because I love it, I also love to teach it. Now it's not my favorite thing to teach--I love to teach beginners English, and watch them move rapidly through utter confusion toward muddling through toward mastery, but it's my second favorite thing.

Some of my most gratifying moments were when students came to me and said, "Thank you for forcing me to read that book. I never thought I could read a book in English." And I am relentless in browbeating kids to do that work. Of course I'm not always successful. I really believe reading is a solitary pursuit, and while I will try to motivate kids by reading paragraphs here and there, I make them do the bulk of it outside the classroom, and do that so we can discuss it in class.

There are some books I won't teach. I'm a great fan of Steinbeck, but I won't teach Of Mice and Men, because I don't want to be the person who introduces my newcomers to racial epithets. Maybe that's lazy thinking on my part, and maybe I could make kids understand them better, but I want my classroom to be a place where those things simply do not exist. I don't want anyone to remember my class as the place they learned that stuff.

I think the way to trick kids into loving reading is to carefully select stories to which they can relate, stories that mirror or expand on their own experiences. As such, I'm very fond of The Joy Luck Club. This is a book full of brilliant interwoven stories of people overcoming the situations into which their thrust and making something of their lives. A great extra, for me, is that it's all about several generations of Chinese women. And although neither I nor a whole lot of my students are either Chinese or women, these are stories that everyone can relate to.

Of course my students are all newcomers, which is kind of a hook for this selection, but they're also facing all sorts of personal difficulties. I think just being a teenager is an almost insurmountable problem in itself. Add to that being in a new and strange country with limited use of the dominant language, and things become challenging indeed.  But people rise up from the most awful situations, and a book like this, I hope, gives my teenagers the notion that they too can overcome their troubles, no matter how awful they may appear right now.

This approach is in stark contrast with that of Common Core, that no one gives a crap what you think or feel. Jesus, who even wants to live in David Coleman's world, where no one gives a crap what you think or feel? While I will grant that I honestly don't give a crap what David Coleman thinks or feels, that sentiment does not extend to my students.  I want them to feel cared for in my class, and I want them to know that I care what they think. That's why I'm always asking them what they think and fairly thrilled when they tell me. I spend a great deal of time trying to open up kids who've been told to sit down and shut up all their lives.

The Common Core approach of answering tedious questions about a text out of context actively discourages love of reading, and is precisely the wrong approach, counter to everything we know about how kids learn. There is certainly a time and place for plodding through tedious text, but that's not how we start our kids. And those best equipped to deal with tedious text are people who love to read.

I gotta admit, I read a lot in college, and there were things I just did not love. Moby Dick, classic though it may be, wasn't my favorite. I had the misfortune of reading Beowulf for not one course, but rather two. By the second course I had learned not to tell the truth when the instructor asked us to write our impressions of this classic work. In my job I'm constantly perusing the Contract and looking through regulations to determine just what is and is not kosher, and I sometimes have to counter the preposterous interpretations of the folks the DOE "legal," whatever that is. I'm fortunate in that a whole lot of folks at UFT have already interpreted the bejeezus out of these things, and that they are always right while "legal" is always wrong. Honestly, I think they just make stuff up and hope for the best.

I developed a love of reading early on. I still remember the first book I read, and being amazed that I'd cracked the code. I moved from there to comic books, and from there to the paperbacks my mom had lying all over the house, and from there to whatever grabbed my attention. Once I found an author I liked I sought out everything that writer produced.

I was lucky because reading, in the high school I attended, entailed mostly reading books aloud. You read page one, the girl behind you reads page two, I read page three, and so on. It's a great gig for an English teacher who doesn't actually want to do anything, and even better for a lazy student like me, who only had to pay attention when the person in front of me was reading. The only books I was asked to read in high school independently were The Incredible Journey, about a dog and a cat running around doing something or other, and The Good Earth, which everyone in my social studies class found fascinating. None of us could get over the notion of arranged marriage, though we were perhaps only one generation away from it.

But not every kid grows up in a house full of books, and for those who don't, teachers are the best bet to pick up the slack. It's tragic that Common Core gives kids precisely the opposite of what they need, and will likely lead them to despise reading rather than simply be indifferent to it. Reading is power, and without it, our kids will be swept under those who possess it. Our system is designed to create and maintain drones rather than thinkers.

We can surely do better. We're kind of pinned under the yoke of ridiculous, arbitrary measures of "college readiness," and we begin to measure such things at absurdly young ages. I don't think Hillary Clinton knows that, or much of anything of what is good education for our kids (as opposed to her own, who attended an elite private school that used none of this nonsense) and sadly, I don't think Bernie Sanders does either.

But as long as we do, it's our job to get the word out.

The Deformer Formula for "De-Motivating" Kids

In all the discussion of higher standards, I doubt the "reformers" have given much consideration to the complexities of motivation.

Some "reformers" seem to think that students who fail will seize the day.  They will harness their inner grit, work harder than ever and power their way to success.  Some may.  Most will not.  Many will wonder what is the purpose of trying.  Many will grow resentful.  Some will shut down their young minds.  These tests and the people who make them do a disservice to humanity.

I learned my first year on the job that a classroom test which fails nearly everybody represents a failure on the part of the teacher who created the test.  Teachers must deal in realities, meet students where they are and try to raise them up.  It is no good to aim far over students' heads to try to smugly prove one's own "smarts."  When NY State sets cut scores to fail 70% of its 2013 Common-Core test takers, the State turned a blind eye to reality and, itself, failed.

Some reformers seem to think that everything meaningful must be measured under conditions of time-pressure.  They think students will be motivated to show off their best stuff.  But, many kids can't sit for that long, let alone, for six days of testing.  They have young minds that wander and sometimes their legs need to do so, also.  Words and numbers may swim on the page.  Kids may over think some questions and tune out others.  They may grow nervous, agitated, fidgety and uncomfortable.  The classroom teacher best understands a child's academic strengths and weaknesses, not a cold, cruel and calculating standardized test.  These tests and the people who make them do a disservice to humanity.

Some "reformers" think that students will be motivated by the promise of becoming "college and career ready."  With the price of college and the lack of meaningful careers, however, the promise may prove false.  Reformers tout their own definition of success, measured primarily in terms of test points and, ultimately, salary figures.  It fails to motivate me.  I don't deal in their definitions, nor do most of the people I know.  To do so would be a disservice to humanity.