All posts in Education Policy

Friday night, while walking our dog, my wife and daughter met a family of five. Of the three children, the middle girl was around seven - close to the same age as my daughter. The oldest - a boy - was ten, and the youngest - a toddler between a year and eighteen months - occupied a stroller. It was cold last night in Portland, and the toddler was bundled up with extra clothes and blankets. The father asked my wife for money.

"The shelters are full," he said. "We're on the waitlist at all the ones we called."

"And we're not going to Portland Mission," the mother said. "I don't know if you've ever seen that place, but you can't bring kids in there."

When my wife and daughter met them, they were on their way back to Safeway. "It's warm in there," the mother said. They were trying to get money for a hotel for the night.

"But even a bench outside Safeway is better than Portland Mission," the father said.

And my wife and daughter helped them out as best they could, but it wasn't enough, because really, in that context, what does enough even look like?

Afterwards, as my wife, daughter, and I talked about it, my wife was struck by the feeling that they were new to the street. "He talked about how people are really possessive of corners," she said. "He was ashamed, but he was having a hard time finding a good spot to ask for money."

And today, I read about Samantha Garvey, a kid whose family had been evicted just before New Years, and how she is a finalist in a national science fair, and how her family is getting a home - and I am really excited to read about her success, but the happiness I feel for her is leavened, because I can't get around the fact that there are thousands of families just like Samantha's who will not be written about in the national press, and who will not be getting off the street, into a shelter, or a home. They will be going precisely nowhere, at least not anytime soon.

And at some point, the three kids my family met last night will end up in school, somewhere. And my hope is that the teachers who have the opportunity to work with them to further their education will have the tools - the money, the time, the resources, and the support - to give them what they need. And I hope that the work these teachers and these students do will be judged and assessed on its own merits, against the backdrop of its own distinct context.

Within the current educational reform discussions, it's very fashionable to say that poverty is not destiny and that things would get better if we could only fire more bad teachers. And, in a very general sense, these truisms - like all truisms - are general enough to resemble something that might even be true. But these oversimplifications - like many of the "obvious" solutions to "fixing" education - break, hard, against the uniquely human conditions within which people are expected to learn. The specifics of the various educational settings are often left out of the discussion, as they don't fit neatly into a truism that makes a good sound bite.

And each day, families drift into homelessness, the distance between the very rich and the very poor continues to increase, social mobility continues to decrease - and against this backdrop, with 22 percent of the children in the US living in poverty, with just under 24 percent of children living in households that experience food insecurity, we need to drop the pretense that education, poverty, and health are separate issues.

Today, my daughter and I drove down Sandy Boulevard, and she looked for the family she met last night. We didn't see them.

She sat back in her seat. "Do you think they found a hotel?" she asked.

"I don't know," I told her. "I hope so."

She wasn't satisfied with that. She likes more precision. She likes to know.

I didn't have a better answer.

It's pretty safe to say that Khan Academy arouses strong feelings; one of the barriers in appreciating what Khan Academy actually delivers is how Khan Academy is typically described. However, the conversations about Khan Academy often get bogged down in the goals and plans for the growth of Khan Academy, as opposed to how Khan can be used. In this post, I want to start with the basics: the elements of Khan Academy that are highlighted within the user interface (UI).

The basic premise of Khan - as reflected in the UI - is all about streamlining time on task, as defined by watching videos and working through problem sets.

The dashboard that measures student progress hews closely to these defined goals. A person can see how much time they have spent watching videos, working on problem sets, and how effective they have been at working through these problem sets.

The curriculum is organized into a series of related problem sets, and people can see their progress reflected in the overall scope and sequence, or as part of the grid that ties the quizzes together within a curricular scope.

The game mechanics keep the focus on working within the confines of the site, with students being rewarded for time on task, and for getting questions right. These game mechanics are baked into a student's work on the site; as a student works on problems, windows pop up and inform them that they can move on to a new exercise, or that they have earned a badge.

From the 30,000 foot view, Khan Academy appears to have given people a means to track progress across computerized tests, with tutorial videos provided to give background on a subject. As part of the package, teachers can monitor the work of their students; in the language used within the Khan Academy UI, this is called "coaching."

What's missing, of course, is any comparable emphasis on open ended thinking, or of problem solving that goes beyond quizzes that have a clear right or wrong answer. Also, while participants have the freedom to chart their own course through the video collection, the fact that people can choose their own path through a large set of videos does not change the fact that - from the perspective of an individual learner - a video collection, no matter how large, no matter how often the videos can be rewound and rewatched, is still just a video collection.

As others have noted, the pedagogical strategy of Khan Academy isn't new, despite the energy and zeal of people proclaiming the arrival of the “flipped classroom.” The notion of providing quality resources to students for asynchronous use outside of class -- and using class time for higher level problem solving, collaboration, and student-led inquiry -- feels pretty familiar to a lot of teachers, despite the fact that many bloggers, pundits, and policymakers seem to be stumbling upon the ideas only recently.

But Khan Academy delivers on two things, better than anything or anyone else has to date. First, the existence of the dashboard within the Khan Academy app has the potential to transform the way educators think about using and accessing data on student progress. The dashboard within Khan Academy is, at this writing, limited by what Khan Academy tracks - time on task, correct and incorrect answers on quiz problems - but even that limited info gives teachers (or "coaches," in KA-speak) the ability to help students in a more timely way. When I see the dashboard in place in KA, I imagine how much more effective a teacher could be if the dashboard was itself an opportunity for interaction between learners - what if, for example, a student could flag that they were stuck on a rough draft, or on a lab, or in using physics as a tool to improve their communities? Expanding the scope of what people can interact about is, at its core, a design issue. The data is there, but simple means to visualize and interact around that data are in short supply. The tools within Khan Academy provide a good starting point for conversations about the value of design within education.

The second thing that Khan has made more accessible is the value of openly licensed educational resources. All material on Khan Academy is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license, which ensures that these resources, and any subsequent improvements, will remain freely available. Because of the enormous generosity of Salman Khan, and the resources he has marshalled into this effort, the world now has an enormous body of good quality material that can be used to learn about a broad range of subjects. The body of material within Khan Academy can be used to replace large sections of traditional textbooks. The support of high-visibility donors has given these resources a credibility that other openly licensed materials, for whatever reason, have never enjoyed. Salman Khan's effort and vision in building a large body of openly licensed material has shifted the way people think about open content. Partnerships with SmartHistory, and the plans to include community-created material within Khan Academy, will widen the breadth of content within Khan Academy, while ensuring that this new material remains freely available, freely modifiable, and freely reusable in perpetuity. Potentially, Khan Academy will be accessible enough that people will realize that textbooks provided by the publishing industry are an unnecessary expense we can all live without.

There are a few different wrinkles in the arguments against seniority-based layoffs, but the point people lead with most frequently is that we need to do everything possible to make sure we keep the best teachers in the classroom.

The argument comes in many flavors, but the quotation below is a fair representation:

I assumed that because my students were proficient or advanced in all subject areas that I would remain in the classroom. Don't school districts want to retain passionate and effective teachers?

However, meeting the stated goal - keeping as many effective teachers in the classroom as possible - does not come directly from ending the use of experience as a criteria in determining how teachers are retained.

People who want to end using experience as a criteria for retaining teachers attempt to make this issue appear simple. However, this oversimplification comes with some baggage. Let's unpack.

Last In First Out versus Teachers as Professionals

The people who advocate ending the use of experience as a factor in how teachers are retained have come up with a catchphrase to identify what they see as the problem: Last In First Out. Renaming the issue is a key factor in all PR/Marketing campaigns, but it attempts to mask the reality that teaching, like most skilled jobs, requires experience as a means to mastery. The publicity campaign against experience is designed to convince people that firing experienced teachers will help us keep better, less experienced teachers.

In other words, they want us to believe that teaching is a job where one doesn't get better over time. However, it's difficult to see where attacking the professionalism and organizational worth of people who have made teaching a career helps improve education, or the lives of the kids who depend on it.

Ending Last In First Out is not the same as keeping the most effective teachers

When teachers are getting laid off, effective teachers are losing their job, no matter what criteria is being used. Any time we are talking about firing a teacher for anything except poor performance, we are talking about removing effective teachers from the classroom. This has nothing to do with Last In First Out, nothing to do with doing right by kids, and everything to do with economics.

People who advocate for ending the use of experience as a factor in hiring and firing decisions often select an individual that appears to prove their point. Of course, a sample size of 1 makes for an emotional story, but that emotional story should not actually be confused with system-wide truth.

Inexperience is not more valuable than Experience

In these simple discussions, the subtext is that the inexperienced teachers are worth keeping, and that the experienced teachers are burnt out and wasting student time. This facet of the conversation reduces both new teachers (young, idealistic, exuberant, energetic, untouched by the system) and experienced teachers (bitter, burnt out, unimaginative, counting days until retirement) to caricatures, but the overall gist is that experience in teaching is not an important asset. And the subtext here is that anyone who has spent more than twenty years teaching must have only done so because they weren't talented enough to do anything else because everyone knows that anyone with any talent either becomes an administrator or changes careers because really, teaching is thankless and the pay sucks.

No other profession treats its most experienced professionals with such callous disregard. Experience matters; an experienced educator teaches more than just the students in his or her classroom. An experienced educator can help shape the practice of new teachers, can help train new administrators, and can provide a poise and balance and perspective that comes from living through decades of transformation in the educational world. These assets help students, and they help shape a school culture.

An additional subtext of this facet of the conversation is that a smart, energetic, untrained person is more effective than an experienced, trained professional. This ties into the ongoing efforts and funding of organizations like Teach For America.

Ending Last In First Out will have a negligible affect on recruiting new talent

Another argument against the value of experience is that new teachers won't join the profession because they are afraid they will be fired:

I consistently see newly credentialed teachers obtaining positions but then losing them after just a year or two. After spending countless hours and dollars in graduate school, they wind up working as instructional assistants, leaving California to teach elsewhere or abandoning the profession altogether.

This line of reasoning reveals the divide between the reality of how education is funded and our rhetoric about how education matters. As people are quick to point out, these are difficult economic times. However, they are less quick to point out that, unless you work for one of the companies that helped destroy our economy in the first place, job security isn't that good anywhere. If our goal is to retain dedicated teachers, it seems to make sense to retain the ones who have shown a commitment to the profession, and can in turn pass down what they know to their younger, less experienced colleagues.

If we want to retain new teachers, we need to pay them well, provide them with opportunities for meaningful professional development, and create a legal and social framework that acknowledges that teachers are professionals.

Occasionally, the language around the importance of a talented teacher circles around to how not valuing experience will somehow increase professionalism:

Educators are able to change kids' lives. We need our laws to reflect the reality that teachers are, in fact, those who can.

This is true. Teachers change lives, and the laws passed need to reflect this. But, rather than simplifying the process of firing teachers (at any level of experience) the laws we need to examine are the laws that fund our schools, pay for teachers, pay for ongoing professional development, and pay for meaningful assessments of student, teacher, and administrative growth. These are the laws that need the greatest adjustment. We should focus our efforts on means that allow us to put more teachers in the classroom, not get rid of more teachers with less effort.

This argument is doubly pernicious because it brings the connotation that the current group of teachers are not professional, and that their professionalism needs to be elevated via legislative intervention.

Ending Last In First Out is predicated on the notion that current methods of determining teacher effectiveness actually work

Even the proponents of Last In First Out acknowledge that they have no current method of evaluating teachers. This proponent of ending Last In First Out in Georgia freely admits this fact:

I hope that after this important step, now Georgia will go even one step further to adopt a process that rewards excellence in teaching, borrowing successful performance and evaluation models from other industries. School systems should determine teacher effectiveness through a combination of performance evaluation, attendance, classroom management, experience and extra school responsibilities.

The irony is, the methods that "reformers" want to "borrow" are often of dubious merit. We know how to evaluate teachers, just as we know how to evaluate students. A blended approach that included peer review, self review, teacher-driven learning goals, formative assessment of student progress, summative assessment of student progress, and administrative review would give us a great idea of what constituted effective teaching.

Conversations we are not having

Unfortunately, when we are talking about whether or not experience should be valued, there are more important conversations that are not taking place.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the effects of poverty, hunger, and health on learning.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the folly of slashing spending on education.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about methods of evaluation that work for and empower students.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about more effective means of teacher professional development.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the difficulty of teaching a curriculum you had no role in choosing within an evaluative framework designed by politicians who have little to no classroom experience.

For the reform advocates who want to devalue professional experience, Last In First Out is a great wedge issue because it weakens unions, pits teachers against one another, and gives implicit value to unproven standardized tests - and it can achieve these goals "for the good of the children." However, learning is more complex than that, and the attempts to shoehorn important arguments into talking points and videos does everyone a disservice.

Image Credit: "you're out" taken by .sanden, published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

On March 2, Congress removed funding for the National Writing Project.

The National Writing Project has a nearly 40 year track record of success. The program costs 25.6 million dollars, and reaches 130,000 teachers and more than 1.4 million students in over 3,000 districts. It also provides a great model of how a national program can provide structure and assistance for local programs without eroding local control. More importantly, it's a model of teacher professional development that scales, and National Writing Project programs help students learn.

The National Writing Project makes an easy target because it is a relatively quiet, modest program. Despite nearly 4 decades of success, they don't use the hyperbolic rhetoric that marks much of the current discussion around education reform. They don't oversell what they do, or oversimplify the amount of work required to enact meaningful change. And unlike many of the newer crop of educational reformers, when they talk about helping kids learn, their conversation is shaped by people who have direct experience working with kids. People working with the National Writing Project tend to focus less on marketing their work, and more on actually doing the work of transforming classrooms through day after day of thoughtful, reflective practice.

By not funding the National Writing Project, Congress and the Obama administration are destroying the kind of programs they they claim they want to support.

The US Department of Education says it wants to fund programs with "the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of students." They want organizations that "have a strong base of evidence that their program has had a significant effect on improving student achievement." They are looking for "(e)xisting, promising programs that have good evidence of their impact and are ready to improve their evidence base while expanding in their own and other communities."

By unfunding the National Writing Project, the US Department of Education is working against its stated goals.

The work of the National Writing Project is subtle. Much of the success of the Writing Project, and the success of the individual teachers whose hard work has shaped the Writing Project over the last 37 years, is predicated on the idea that deliberate, repeated, thoughtful reflection helps improve learning. This idea is not flashy; the benefits of this work unfold slowly over time. The work of the National Writing Project lacks the silver bullet mystique of some of the other "reforms" now currently in vogue. The National Writing Project helps learners at all levels find their voice. It is a stark contrast to programs that believe that developing teacher expertise requires filling their head with an external voice.

The skills developed within teachers and students who work in the local Writing Projects cut across traditional curricular boundaries. Writing Project sites and teachers flourish in urban and rural settings, and in public and private schools. The skills developed through programs supported by the National Writing Project work to support learners of all ages. If we are serious about improving education, the National Writing Project is a program we should expand, not eliminate.

But for now, funding from this program has been cut. For next steps, you can contribute. Contact your representatives in Congress. Get involved in a local Writing Project. And: write.