Up Against a Rubric Wall

Rubrics are the great equalizer. Once you have a list that goes up and down, with various levels at every point, everyone will know what is expected. You are this square, you are that square, and that's the only possible square in which you can reside. Fair is fair, square is square, and you are there without a care. We have extracted that inconvenient human element with 100% efficiency.

Of course, sometimes people see things differently. For example, your supervisor may be batshit crazy. Or maybe he hates you and everything you stand for. Or maybe he holds a grudge for that year you shared the classroom when you failed to erase the board. On the other hand, perhaps he loves you. Maybe he has an entire wall of his studio apartment covered with your pictures. Maybe he has torrid fantasies about you in or out of your classroom. Who knows?

Of course, things need not be so extreme. Thinking people approach one another differently. It's not necessary to lecture and instruct on differentiation when your audience has a modicum of intelligence. Of course, if that's not the case, all your lectures and theories go out the window because non-thinking people tend not to receive or process new information very well anyway.

But regardless of what qualities we have, good, bad or otherwise, we all have our prejudices. We all like certain people better than we like others. And supervisors, too, see us all differently. I hate to be the one to break you this news, but despite everything you've heard, there is no way on God's green earth that every supervisor rates the same lesson in the same way. It doesn't matter how many times they've been trained. It doesn't matter how many times they've been retrained in whatever the rubric wants this year, last year, or next year.

Can I get rated highly effective while you get rated ineffective? Sure. Why not? Maybe I got rated for minute one, which was amazing, while you got rated for minute 7, which sucked beyond all possible question. Or maybe minute 7 was the bestest thing ever but the supervisor wasn't wearing glasses. Maybe his prescription is out of date. Maybe he woke up and put on his wife's glasses instead of his. Or he's Mr. Magoo, can't see at all, and only hears the voices in his head.

But that's the hand you're dealt. And unfortunately, no matter how precisely Charlotte Danielson words her rubric, it's always subject to interpretation. It's really too bad she sold out and allowed her framework to be used for high stakes evaluation. As a supportive and motivational instrument, it could have been used to improve education for children.

As is, it's used to fire teachers. Amazing we live in a society so obsessed with doing such a thing.

Land of a Thousand Rubrics

I've been attending curriculum development workshops all week. We're looking at Common Core, without which no sentient being can function, and one of our sub-categories is rubrics. Yesterday we created some of our own.

I'll be frank. I have never liked rubrics. The first time I saw them was when a new, two-day, four-composition English Regents exam came out. I read the grading rubrics and got a general idea of what levels 1-4 meant. From then on I marked more or less holistically. I used to know one teacher who treated the rubrics with great reverence and examined them quite thoroughly. It was very rough partnering because by the time you finished a class set of essays this teacher would be on number 2 or 3, if you were lucky.

I've been teaching for 30 years. I'm pretty good about reading papers. I comment on them and offer advice as needed. One of the most frustrating things, to me, is watching a kid look at the paper, or not, and then crumple and toss it away. More motivated kids tend to reflect a little more. My question is this--after I spend time writing a rubric, who's to say kids wont toss them away too?

I kind of understand the thinking. There's got to be a way to get a good grade. What the hell is this teacher looking for? And it's true there are conventions, and mechanics, and standard usage. I like paragraphs and organization, and I like being able to easily understand things. But during the presentation I kept hearing words like "grapple" and "complex." The word "simple" is used as a pejorative. I think Pete Seegar said, of iconic American songwriter Woody Guthrie:

Any damn fool can get complicated. It takes a genius to attain simplicity.

People don't still sing This Land Is Your Land because they want to grapple with complex ideas. They sing it because it's direct and simple, because it hits you like an arrow to your heart. Still, dedicated Gates-o-philes want to measure things with lexiles and make kids read train schedules instead of To Kill a Mockingbird.

If I'm forced to use rubrics to rate my kids' essays I'll do it. I do, after all, get paid for this stuff. But I'm more comfortable issuing general checklists, which kids understand better, and then demanding particular and different things from particular and different kids for rewrites. Isn't that actually the elusive differentiation of instruction we hear about?

And, in fact, the essays and projects are fine, but we still have tests that overshadow and override them. No matter how many projects they do, my students, who don't necessarily know English yet, can't graduate until they pass an English Regents exam that tests very little of what it is they actually need to know. Grappling with complex text is not their first priority, and I'd argue it ought not to be the first priority of native-born kids either. That's what you do way better after you learn to love and appreciate reading, and something you do when you need to. It's not remotely how you teach. 

How can we differentiate instruction if the test is always the same, and the evaluation is always the same? In the quest to quantify everything, we're producing a lot of rules. It's hard for me to see, though, how we're producing critical thinking or better-equipped kids, unless our ultimate goal is to make them take more and more standardized tests.