Ars Docendi

Readers of my posting on the flexible classroom (“The Class of a Thousand Spaces”) know that in a room where little is nailed down, much is possible. The other requirements of a successful flexibility are 1) a teacher whose approach to learning varies with the kind of learning to take place, 2) students who are ready to learn, in numbers that make flexibility feasible, 3) school administrators who are educational leaders (rather than, say, Ukrainian commissars or bean counters), and 4) things that work properly.

Teaching is, broadly speaking, of three main kinds: didactic instruction for imparting knowledge, coaching for development of skill, and Socratic teaching for encouraging the achievement of understanding. In the flexible classroom the flexible teacher will manage all three. Regrettably, most teachers’ focus tends to be entirely or mostly on didactic instruction.

It is also the focus of most educational software. Unlike the software, however, a practiced teacher can shift to coaching and Socratic instruction at need. Is there a good math teacher alive who does not insist that students show their work? That is because knowledge of the correct answer is only part of the learning involved. If a teacher sees a problem in the work, he or she can coach in the skill needed or try and establish an understanding in the student by asking particular questions based on the work and the student’s response.

And not just a math teacher. Robert Frost wrote a poem called “The Objection to Being Stepped On,” which opens “At the end of the row/ I stepped on the toe/ Of an unemployed hoe.” I invited my students to read it, at first without accompanying notes. One of them surprised me by saying that “this is a poem I can relate to.”

“Really?” I said. “Why is that?”

“Because it’s about a hoe!”

I suddenly understood, but pretended to naïveté and asked, “What interests you about a gardening tool? Do you enjoy gardening?”

He was puzzled, so I drew a hoe and explained its use. Though disappointed that the poem was not about a whore, he was already partly invested in it and ended up deciding that the rest of the poem made sense even if he could no longer relate to it. He eventually got the allusion to Isaiah and the wry, dry joke of a hoe as weaponry. I felt that he would not have got so far into it if someone had opened the discussion with a didactic statement (or internet screen) that “this is a poem about a man who hurts himself stepping on a garden tool.”  He would just have gone into parrot mode and learned the knowledge he needed in order to mimic understanding.

One of the reasons I was able to speak to him as much and as often as I did was that the class had fewer than fifteen students in it. Such numbers allow an extent of coaching and Socratic questioning that becomes impossible in a larger class.

This would be true not just in a poetry class but also in a math class. A math teacher in a small class can ask students to show their work, presumably not just to verify that they have actually worked, but also to see how they are proceeding or going astray. The aim should be to discuss the work and advise how it might go better. This, too, is easier in a small class than in a large one. The I. B. math tests require students to show their work and give (or withhold) marks for work done well, poorly, or not at all, regardless of The Answer (though of course the correct answer gains marks too). It is hard to see how software could do the same thing, or how a math teacher with students in three figures could examine each one’s work thoroughly.

Much of what I am reporting on seems to lie behind the success of the Mooresville (N. C.) schools in improving the quality of their students’ work, but that is not what The New York Times focused on. True, the subheadline said “It’s Not Just About the Laptops,” but the tag for the article at the top left of the printed page gives away the true point of view, saying, “Mooresville School District, a Laptop Success Story.” I would say, by contrast, that the success of the Mooresville schools is due to their trying to structure teaching and learning in more flexible and productive ways, and not primarily to their adopting laptops.

I wish them well, but some elements of their plan look flawed. As usual with schools on a budget trying to adopt expensive IT gadgetry, something has to give, and at Mooresville it is class size, which has risen from 18 to 30. When they have to get their students to a level of achievement that embraces skill and understanding as well as knowledge, they are going to find it more difficult than they think if they have abandoned a class size that allows teachers to be coaches and questioners as well as drop-in advice-givers. If, as reported, they divide their attention according to who has lower scores, they are not meeting the needs of the higher-scoring students, who have their questions too.

The following example, though small, is emblematic. Earlier this year a student of mine surprised me by mentioning an author’s use of polysyndeton, not a word I usually associate with 11^th-grade criticism. Knowing him, I was sure that he hadn’t just idly copied the note from a source, so I pointed out that the example in question was a complex sentence whose ands did not all link grammatically parallel sentence elements. He understood me and made the needed change in his explanation. His problem is as deserving of attention as the problem of the boy attracted to hoes, and in a small class both problems will be attended to by the thorough teacher.

Mooresville will also have to find ways to deal with what the Times article generously or naïvely calls “growing pains.” I refer to connection and bandwidth problems as well as to the problem of students’ cutting and pasting or otherwise transferring “information” from one tab or window to another without real understanding. These are not “growing pains,” and the solution will not be to let things grow. School storerooms across the country are filled with unused stuff that was first described as having “growing pains.”

And their visitors will have to do something that the Times reporter has not yet done: they will have to see improvement as more than the right “balance between old tricks and new technology.” If studying the geography of a place means no longer having to make salt-and-flour maps, that is a real—but minuscule—advance. Far more important will be exchanging, where possible, the grid for more accommodating classroom models. More important yet will be replacing the monochrome teacher by a coach of many colors, aiming for a class size and classroom flexibility that allow the multifarious coach and questioner and his or her students to thrive in their joint enterprise. It sounds as if Kathryn Higgins, an English teacher referred to in the article, has found some ways to do so. Government officials will also have to start mandating in ways that don’t encourage well-meaning district administrators like Mark Edwards to look at widely publicized but superficial single high-stakes scores rather than exercise the subtlety they would probably like to use when evaluating their students. Reporters will also need to back away in their reporting from the old cliché that all conflicts in education boil down to a contest between The Future and The Old Farts’ Corner.

The homegrown Writing Assessment I discussed in my last posting sought to peg students’ writing against grade-by-grade standards that we teachers felt we could reasonably expect students to meet. The standards started with those of the senior year, and the question we asked of each essay was Would this piece of writing be acceptable to a teacher of first-year students at a good U. S. university? From that standard down to the one governing 9^th-grade writing was a series of plausible steps.

At each grade we divided the range of possible writing into six different levels. Any essay that got a 4 or higher met the standard for that grade. (Essays getting 5 were significantly better than what was required, and essays getting 6 were dazzling.) Graduating seniors getting 4 could expect not to be massacred in freshman comp; those getting 3s were in some danger if they didn’t work hard. A 3 therefore meant “not quite at the mark.”

Each essay received a grade of 1 to 6 (or 0 for an evasion or no response) from two teachers, so the total grade was from 0 (rarely given) to 12 (also rarely given).  The two teachers had to be within 1 mark of each other, a requirement not hard to impose. Our work as a department ensured that we would look at our students’ writing in more or less the same way: what does it do that good 12^th-grade writing ought to do?

And what characterized a senior essay we rated a 4? The student engaged with the question asked, on the whole successfully and thoughtfully. There was a balance between generalization and detail. The writing was unified and generally coherent. The student had a reasonably good grip on grammar and syntax. There was no waffle or baloney. The writing did not cloy. The diction was suitable to formal circumstances. Spelling was generally good. Having the result graded twice helped ratify the choice of marks (most of our composite grades were in even numbers) or suggested slight deviations from standard.

It is in light of our standard for giving a 4 that I read a startling article this week in The New York Times, which also discussed essays receiving a 4/6—in this case on the New York State Regents’ test. A quoted example began, “In life, ‘no two people regard the world in exactly the same way,’ as J. W. von Goethe says. Everyone sees and reacts to things in different ways. Even though they may see the world in similar ways, no two people’s views will ever be exactly the same. This statement is true since everyone sees things through different viewpoints.”  Looked at using our standard, the extract shows no problems of grammar, syntax, or spelling; but then it sinks.  Where is the successful engagement with the question? The balance of generalization and detail? Saying essentially the same thing three times is waffle, and the question-begging in the last sentence shows thoughtlessness. Yet this essay received a 4 from the Regents. I kept asking myself what the writer would need to do to get a 2.

Even that question was not answered in the article, which also showed short-answer paragraphs scored as 0, 1, or 2. The following sentence opened a paragraph getting a 1, presumably something like a 3 on the 6-point scale: “In the poem, the poets use of language was very depth into it.” If this is the opening sentence of a middling paragraph, what would open a bad one? Here are two sentences from an essay that received a 3 from the Regents: “Even though their is no physical conflict withen each other. Their are jealousy problems between each other that each one wish could have.”

I can’t imagine what “standard” such writing in a 12^th-grader “nearly” meets. There doesn’t seem to be much use in “standards-based” education with such standards, or “data-based” education with such data. The author of the Times article notes that 12^th-grade writers like this actually stood a decent chance of achieving the 65 required to pass the Regents’ test. To hear that the Chancellor of the Board of Regents wants to raise the passing score to 75 is thus not very comforting. I kept wondering how I could “teach” students for twelve years and have them “reach” the point of such an “achievement.”

The school where I had my flexible classroom gave us much room for movement in other things too. In general, the principle was to trust the teachers’ professional judgment, and in general the principle worked. One of the things the English department decided to do was to implement an in-house testing program using homemade “instruments,” i.e. tests, to size up the proficiency of our students.

We called them simply the Reading Assessment and the Writing Assessment. In one the students answered open-ended questions about a passage they had read; in the other, they wrote an essay on a prompt devised by the teachers. What interests me about these tests in retrospect, particularly in light of all the hubbub about high-stakes testing, was how little we thought along the lines laid out by the high-stakes testing people.

We had two purposes in giving the tests. One was to see whether, in general, we could identify problems and strengths in classes of students in order to shape what we taught and how we taught it. The other was to give us a chance to work together at grading the assessments, thereby achieving a broad consensus on marking.

It’s a good thing we didn’t give these tests for “high stakes.”  Many years an insurgency developed among the students whereby they would throw their tests or otherwise rebel against taking them. Such insurgencies were rarely very big, but we usually ended up knowing what was happening and how they might affect results. But one year a particularly charismatic student managed to get a fairly widespread test-rebellion going. We found that in the class concerned, the tests were unusually poor, taken as a whole.

One set of ruined results did not have any dire consequences: we just marked them as we had planned and then discussed how we could head off test-rebelliousness in the future. But I wonder now what would have happened in a setting where such tests had high-stakes consequences for teachers’ raises or even their future employment. I have never heard of research being done on the problem of throwing tests even though such  mischief is a credible threat to the integrity of test results.

The way we marked the tests was to call long meetings for such purposes, which we called “grading parties.” (Whoopee!) Before the parties we would devise standards for marking, and then at the beginning of the meeting we would go over them, assuring each other that we understood them or had modified them to take account of the group’s consensus about how to proceed. If results required it, we would revise our standards and re-apply them.

The department head (I was that lucky individual) would prepare the test papers so the students’ names could not be seen by the teachers, and I’d set them up so they would be graded by two teachers, neither of them that student’s teacher that year. After each paper was marked, I would compare grades to see whether they were close to each other. If there was a large discrepancy, I would have the two teachers confer about their marks. These conferences did not occur too often, but usually one teacher would end up modifying a mark. When neither one budged, I would step in. Since the test score was the sum of the two teachers’ grades, I would issue a revised score and give the two teachers a brief opinion backing my action.

Even without conferences, teachers began to have a sense of whether they were too lenient or too severe in their marking by seeing how their marks compared to those of their colleagues. We also benefited from ideas our colleagues had, which had not occurred to us. The parties were a good way of smoking out problems that led to severe or lenient results. I found that by the end of a day of marking (for that is at least how long it usually took) we were closer in our marking than we had been at the beginning of the exercise.

We could use the results to determine what characteristic problems or strengths in writing or reading each class had and (after the beginning-of-year test) teach to those problems or strengths. Each of us had a stronger sense of how the others marked, and we tended to view essays critically in similar ways.

All these seemed like worthwhile goals for testing. We never considered the possibility of using the tests to rate teachers. This is not just because we shied away from such things: we had a program developed by an ingenious consultancy[1] whereby we visited each others’ classrooms and lessons, offering helpful and frank suggestions for increasing or strengthening the learning that took place there.

The reason that we didn’t use students’ results to evaluate teachers was that we didn’t believe in “proxy” values. When you evaluate a student, you evaluate a student. When you evaluate a teacher, you evaluate a teacher. It might make sense to use students’ results as part of the evaluation of a teacher if the method of evaluation relied on subtlety and good judgment and took other things into account than just students’ scores on a single “instrument,” but fortunately we were not in the position of having consequential decisions about teachers follow on our marking of students.

Much has been made of a recent study[1] that shows a correlation between the “effectiveness” of teachers as determined by the scoring of their students on “value-added metrics” and these students’ success in their later lives as determined by “markers.”  This muchness put me in mind—again—of Flannery O’Connor’s remark that “[t]he devil of educationalism that possesses us is the kind that can be cast out only by prayer and fasting.” I am not so sanguine as O’Connor: even prayer and fasting don’t often seem to work! I keep wondering what could possess whole communities of people to be stunned by a complex statistical study embodying years of data on millions of students when it concludes that children with good teachers do better than children with bad. One of the devils in the legion seems to be rather dim, but I will try to give the devil his due.

The original report is impressive in its thoroughness and the care with which its authors make and qualify their claims. They note, for example, that teachers in the study were not “incentivized based on test scores,” thereby skirting the effect of cheating, teaching to tests, and other “distortions in teacher behavior” that make the basis of value-addition different from what it would be in a population whose members had been “incentivized”—that is, in the real world of Campbell’s Law. There is no guarantee that results like this study’s would be similar to those in a district whose teachers were looking over their shoulders at the Value-added Reaper as he made his progress through their ranks. The twofold problem is that the use of “value-added metrics” encourages teaching to tests (the most-purchased books in the New York schools are books of preparation for tests), and there is evidence in research as well as the educational experience of the human race that teachers who teach to tests get worse results than teachers who don’t.

They caution that some elements of the value-added equation require “observing teachers over many school years” and may not apply in a “high stakes environment with multitasking and imperfect monitoring”—that is, precisely, the kind of environment in which hasty “consequential decisions” will be made on the basis of imperfect applications of the equation over the short term.

They point out as a justification for their aggregate numbers that “observable characteristics are sufficiently rich so that any remaining unobserved heterogeneity is balanced across teachers,” but those who want to use “value-added metrics” to make consequential decisions will be applying the equation to particular individuals without correction for “unobserved heterogeneity.”

They note that their study did not include the effect of peers and of parental investment in value-addition. While everyone agrees that the teacher’s effect on what students learn is pronounced, this seems like a significant omission that could have serious consequences for the teachers whose students’ peers and parents had a significant effect on the learning for which the teacher is held exclusively reponsible.

The authors state that the study’s assumptions “rule out the possibility that teacher quality fluctuates across years.” Can this be? Raise your hand if your quality was as good in your first year of teaching as in your tenth.

In addition to what the authors say in qualification and limitation of their results, I have a few questions. They say that “value added is difficult to predict based on teacher observables.” Do the people who want to use value-added metrics as the basis for personnel decisions want to go a step farther and assert that there is nothing observable that a teacher can actually learn or plan to do or avoid that will make a difference in how she or he scores?  This seems like a bizarre position for someone who believes in life-long learning.

I want to understand in non-mathematical terms how “academic aptitude” is factored into the equation so that teachers will not be “penalized” for taking classes of difficult or refractory students. It seems to be a single number (η_i) in the equation, but how is it derived?

I would like to know how many years’ value-added ratings they think a teacher should receive before the ratings can be said to reflect his or her actual performance, and I would like to understand the basis for this determination. It is one thing to say that we have some aggregate statistics that show teachers in general have certain effects on their students in the long run, and a rather different thing to say that these statistics can reliably rate individual teachers in one or two goes. This is particularly true given that the authors themselves say some elements of the value-added equation require “observing teachers over many school years.”

Having asked my questions I now make a couple of observations. One of the study’s authors, according to The New York Times, says that value-added metrics should be used even though “mistakes will be made” and “despite the uncertainty and disruption involved.” It is disturbing to see someone so fastidious in the drawing of conclusions become so sweeping and remorseless in applying them, particularly when the study itself has just spoken to the need to “weigh the cost of errors in personnel decisions against the mean benefit from improving teacher value-added.”

The problem with “mean benefits” is that they have particular consequences. The authors have said that they think it would be more cost-effective to fire ineffective teachers (even mistakenly ineffective ones) than to give bonuses to effective ones. I keep wondering whether this kind of decision-making will be ethos-effective. I keep wondering who is going to be attracted to a profession governed by such principles and assumptions as those that lie behind value-added systems. “Drifters and misfits,” as Hofstadter called them? The authors of the study note that no observable teacher behavior correlates to value addition, so I wonder who will join a profession in which it cannot be said with confidence what he needs to do in order to be successful.

The moral and intellectual world in which the discernment of quality was a matter of finesse or connoisseurship and in which reward and reprobation follow particular deeds or ways of doing things is the same one in which we could say without a quantitative rationalization that the students of good teachers do better than the students of bad. That world is also a place where both teachers and administrators take their duties seriously, including the duty to counsel and correct when needed and to accept counsel and correction when deserved or needed.

It might be worth ending with a note on the stereotype that people who are against value-added “measurement” are unionists, educational bureaucrats, or people with tenure to lose in a change of system. In my twenty-five years as a teacher I have never worked within a tenure-granting system.  I have never been in a union shop, nor have I been a member of a teachers’ union. I have never held an administrative position in education except that of Department Head. I have never worked in a teachers’ college. If I am against the kind of practice discussed in this posting, it is not because I have a hidden interest. It is because it seems wrong. I mean both wrong-headed and culpable.

It’s time to stop using the expression “brick-and-mortar school” as if there is any other kind. I mean in particular to oppose the terms “virtual” and “on-line” being applied to schools, for such network-connections-and-data-bases don’t act as schools except in a threadbare and impoverished sense.

Or are they even as good as threadbare? The standard of “progress” mandated by No Child Left Behind, described generously as “very crude” by Professor Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, would qualify as threadbare. And yet applying even that standard, a recently released study co-authored by Professor Miron showed that on-line “schools” did worse at “improving” their students than “brick-and-mortar” schools did. (It also showed that for-profit “schools” did worse than non-profit schools.)

The late sociologist James S. Coleman did a large study reported in his 1987 book Public and Private High Schools. In it he found that the single strongest correlate of effectiveness in ordinary high-school education was that the schools in which the effective education took place were functional communities. A network is not a community, though some communities do function partially through networks. There is certainly nothing communitarian in an arbitrarily collected group of young people sitting by mandate in front of screens. Nor do such groups bear any resemblance to the ad hoc groupings (not communities) sometimes found on social networks, whose members make a choice to share some limited interest or focus. That is one reason we distinguish between communities and interest groups or single-interest constituencies; but we should also distinguish between networks and any of those other collections, for a network need have none of the above.

For something to be “virtual” in the traditional sense, it must operate under some kind of power or agency (a “virtue”) that has an essential and sufficient effect even though the thing in question does not take its usual form. What essential and sufficient agency is at work in a “virtual” school? Surely the answer can’t be “instruction”! Of the three kinds of learning—knowledge, skill, and understanding—educational software can hope to deliver only knowledge. Skill requires coaching, and the last time I looked, almost all coaches were genuine human beings, for how could they not be in order to adapt themselves to their students’ needs? And the promotion of understanding requires Socratic questioning, which software cannot provide, for something like the reason that it cannot play a good game of gō.

When I think of software providing understanding, it puts me in mind of the electronic confessional in THX 1138. The Donald Pleasance character receives “understanding” from his “confessor,” but the movie invites us not to congratulate the effectiveness of future cybernetics but to mourn the threadbareness of a life to which that “confessor” could offer anything significant.

In the most famous example of Socratic questioning, Socrates himself hears his acquaintance Thrasymachus assert that justice is the interest of the stronger party. Socrates asks him a series of questions whose answers lead Thrasymachus to understand that justice cannot possibly be what he has just claimed. Socrates holds him to each answer he gives by asking one more question about that answer till Thrasymachus grasps fully why he was in error to make that assertion. This is not something that can be programmed because—in real life, if not in a dialogue planned by Plato—the programmer cannot know what a respondent’s next answer will be to an open-ended question, and it is these open-ended questions that force the respondent to step out of the box of slogans and memorized lines that he brought to the discussion. Until then, “justice” might as well be the montillation of traxoline.

Good teachers understand all of this, which is why some teachers in Idaho (and elsewhere) are protesting the mandating of online “schooling.” One of them, Ms. Ann Rosenbaum, sounds like a formidable person and a dedicated teacher, and one not to shrink from a struggle. It is a pity that she must come up against such sorry adversaries as Idaho’s governor Otter and its schools superintendent Luna. Luna falls back on vacuous clichés like “schools of the 21^st century,” while Otter says that if Ms. Rosenbaum “only has an abacus in her hand, she is missing the boat.” Of course, that is not the only thing that Ms. Rosenbaum has in her hand, as the article shows. (Thankfully, it doesn’t show what Governor Otter has in his hand.)

But she doesn’t need anything in her hand when she is using the Socratic method: “engag[ing] students with questions” and “using each answer to prompt the next” question. Of all the questions Socrates asks Thrasymachus, only the first one could appear on question-and-answer software. Ms. Rosenbaum doesn’t want to give up a rich line of questioning for haring around fields of knowledge with questions asked arbitrarily, which is basically what question-and-answer software does.

A “virtual school” is not a community, nor can it be one. It does not have a sufficiency of action by virtue of which it offers a complete education. It will provide coaching for skill at about the same time that country clubs can replace the pro shop by the machine shop. It cannot impart or ratify understanding. Why are we calling it a “school,” and why are we moving towards such things? I am afraid the answers to these questions have little or nothing to do with education. While we are turning up the answers, let us refrain from “saying the thing that is not,” as Jonathan Swift called it[1]; for an on-line “school” is not a school.

May your classroom be full, but not too full, of eager students.

May your students not be jaded.

May they have had a good night’s sleep.

May they greet you when they come in and bid you goodbye when they leave.

May they look you in the eye but not get in your face.

May they never say “whatever.”

May they get their work done—by themselves.

May the sparks in their lives be of interest not notes.

May their parents appreciate what you do for them.

May your classroom not enchain you with gadgets or constrain you with needless routines.

May its main source of light be sunshine.

May your bag of tricks be bottomless.

May the only added value in your life be the value added to your abundantly deserved retirement accounts.

May your administrators be educators.

May they see the paradox in preparing individual students for standardized tests.

May they not think that schools are a business or education a product.

May your school’s mission be expressible in under ten words, none of them a superlative.

May nothing in your building leak.

May your school’s network work.

May you be possessed of the serenity to accept the human condition and the keenness to relish the good things you have.

branding irony: a description or name chosen for its public relations value that is the opposite of what is actually the case with the thing named, as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Value Added Learning

era (n): 1. a brief period of time. a. in education, the time between the introduction of a great new reform like value-added learning and the point when it is cast off as unworkable. 2. (obsolete) any long period of time seen in light of a unifying factor

eternity (n.): in a school’s faculty room, the period before everything works as well and looks as nice as it does in the administrative offices.

failure (n): a key to success. The idea of building grit and building self-control … you get … through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.—Dominic Randolph, Headmaster, Riverdale Country School, New York. Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential—J. K. Rowling in her commencement address at Harvard.

profit (n): a tangible or intangible gain. non-profit education: teaching for the benefit of students. for-profit education: the simulation of teaching for the benefit of investors.

As I write this, it is 37°F/3°C and raining in Helsinki, Finland. Fortunately, educators wanting to stay dry and save money on international fact-finding missions need not head for distant stormy weather. Instead they may go to Rockville Centre, New York (49°F/9° and partly sunny), where Diane Ravitch reports that South Side High School, a public high school, has “closed the achievement gap,” or is closing it, between its white and Asian students and its black and Latino students. Moreover, it has done so without tracking and without fund-doping by businessmen’s foundations. Best of all, these improvements, having taken place and been sustained over a number of years, look solid and believable, so unlike the overnight wonders and nocturnal remissions touted by the Instant Solutions balonists[1] in government and among the oh-so-helpful foundations. And, as Ravitch points out, Rockville Centre is “closer than Finland.”

It is against this backdrop of success that Carol Burris, the principal of South Side, wrote an open letter with another principal that has since been signed by over 650 principals from around New York State protesting RAce to the Top (RAT) and value-added learning. Principals protesting! Hardly are the words out when I race down Memory Lane to Mr. Wood, Mr. Bemis, Mr. Miller, Mr. Searles, and Sister St. Joan. Protest? What can have happened between their principalships and now? Readers of these postings will know, but it is one thing to read about a misbegotten policy and another to realize that it is forcing a state’s educators into open opposition.

I don’t think we will see Occupy the Lyndon Baines Johnson DOE Building just yet, but it will be fascinating to see how this disagreement plays out. The Department of Education’s approach attracted a wonderfully pungent comment from Mario Fernandez, a New York principal, who said, “They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.” Pan shot of schoolhouse wreckage with Lena Horne singing “Stormy Weather.” Fade to South Side High School.

* * *

Meanwhile, Rick Roach, a member of the Orange County, Fla. (68°F/20°C), Board of Education decided to sit down to the standardized tests of 10^th-grade math and reading mandated in his school district. To his chagrin he got ten math answers right out of 60, and, he thought, those only by guesswork. He scored 62% on the reading test, which makes him barely passable—this though in his main line of work he has a position of responsibility in a large organization for which he has to “make sense of complex data” related to his responsibilities.

He notes with some indignation that the math test is used as part of the basis for counseling students into or away from college preparation (and, I fear, for evaluating teachers’ success in their work). He suggests that the test should have more of the kind of math used in the “real world,” whatever that is; and while I can understand his upset, I think this suggestion is somewhat misguided. More to the point in my mind is his complaint that the tests are being used without accountability. I don’t think he means the accountability of teachers through RAT and other “data” “proving” their high crimes and misdemeanors. Rather, he means an intellectual justification of the tests and of the precise use to which they are actually being put. Readers of this posting of mine may wonder whether that is possible. Readers of this posting, in which Valerie Strauss interviews Mr. Roach, will see that he has some serious and clearly stated objections to the test itself that should be carefully considered by people like those to whom Ms. Burris’s letter is addressed. Who knows that such study and attention won’t be the prelude to some educational climate change?

We seem to proceed as individuals and as groups by keeping a kind of balance between, on the one hand, our mental tendency to find (or create) structures and systems in whose stability and truth we can repose and, on the other, our tendency to leave those structures behind and “seek a great perhaps,” from which new patterns, structures, systems and truth emerge. When we stop proceeding, it is either because these structures have made us rigid and immobile, or because we stall or rattle around aimlessly, a perhaps turning out to have been a perhaps-not. A good education should therefore help us to know or become a part of some of these systems and structures while at the same time equipping us (or leaving us) with the means to seek our perhapses, great or otherwise.

That being the case, if David Weinberger is right that “knowledge…is going the way of the recording industry” and that “knowledge,” as a term, “won’t survive the generation,” we are looking at a prospect of serious imbalance between two of the main complementary aims of life. That is because knowledge in any useful sense has an institutional or formal aspect or component, whether created specially, found, or adapted. There are two extreme alternatives. One is the ossified knowledge—“caked wisdom,” as Barzun calls it—within ossified structures and institutions. The other, which Weinberger’s writing appears to predict, is the mind of Jorge Borges’s Funes the Memorious, which Funes himself calls a “garbage heap” and which I might call in this context a dysfunctional democracy of perhapses. As custodians of education we should examine the direction schooling is taking in order to prevent or minimize the extent of the disaster.

It is in this context that I propose we treat “information literacy” and the “democracy of information” with caution. For every one person gifted in powers of synthesis and creation who will gain from productive travel through the “big, blooming buzz of confusion,” there will be many who rattle around there, ending repeatedly in doleful perhaps-nots. For every John Campbell who grows rich “grazing the common of literature” we will have an awful lot of aimless cud-chewing, or worse:

From Blank to Blank—
A Threadless Way
I pushed Mechanic feet—
To stop—or perish—or advance—
Alike indifferent—

If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed—
I shut my eyes—and groped as well
‘Twas lighter—to be Blind—[1]

The old British saying “Slowly slowly catchee monkey” is the beginning of wisdom in “educational reform,” but let us also add “Thinkee thinkee catchee monkey.” Unfortunately, that is not the way some education organizations see it, and so we get education “reforms” undertaken precipitately with poor thinking behind them, leaping intrepidly forward into a mess.

In Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, as our hero strikes his Faustian bargain with Mephistophélès, an eerie chord sounds in the orchestra. One day recently, as I looked at the guidelines for submitting a proposal for a RAce to the Top (RAT) Grant on pages 18171 – 18185 of the Federal Register, I felt that if I had been examining those pages as a preliminary to signing on for a RAT Grant, I would have heard a similar eerie chord menace my determination.

Ask good teachers or administrators what the chief difficulty in their jobs is, and you will probably hear that they do not have enough time to do the job. Another likely complaint, which I must give as a Brit might say it, is that there is “too much bumf[1].” Reading the DOE’s estimate that it takes 2735-1/2 hours to complete a RAT grant application sounds a menacing chord in my apprehensive mind: if it takes more hours than the average person works in a year to complete the application, what will it take to implement the program? For an unfortunate answer, see below.

The chord would become more insistent in the mind of a thinking educator who reads[2] that the grantee must have as an “absolute priority” the intention to “measure” student “knowledge and skills” across a set of standards, including those “against which student achievement has been traditionally difficult to measure.” The inquiring skeptic wants to know what happened to understanding in addition to knowledge and skill as a component of “achievement.” He asks why measuring some standards would be “traditionally difficult.” Maybe the difficulty here is not traditional but ontological.

To help understand why, consider by analogy a trip to the Louvre to “measure the achievement” of the Mona Lisa. Imagining Thomas Hoving, clipboard and rubric in hand, in front of the picture before passing judgment should help us to see where the problem lies: We must be careful about what we mean when we say “measure achievement.” We must leave ourselves open to the possibility that some judgments  (and some achievements!) have nothing to do with measurement, period. Instead, they have to do with know-how or connoisseurship and are handled non-quantitatively. Exploring how to apply such thinking to students’ work must be done slowly—maybe even more slowly than filling out the RAT grant application.

But that is not what the good people of Tennessee did. In their haste to be first off the mark at implementing a RAT program, they came up with what sounds like a nightmarish scheme of evaluating—well, yes, students, but also their teachers. I will briefly mention a few outstanding horrors in what I read here and here (The New York Times and Education Week):

Plans for single lessons requiring 4 – 12 hours for an experienced teacher to prepare were rejected as insufficient before being rewritten.

In subjects that do not have “measurements” available for students’ “achievement,” teachers were assessed, and held accountable for, students’ scores on tests unrelated to the subject they teach. For example, a music teacher was held accountable by a test of her students’ writing, which was presumably taught by their writing teacher. You read that right.

Principals must evaluate each teacher five times a year in a process that includes a 20-minute pre-observation discussion, a one-period observation, and a 20-minute debriefing. Assuming a 50-minute lesson and a faculty of 65 teachers, a principal would have to spend about fourteen hours of contact time a week with teachers for their evaluations alone, whether they were good or bad. That doesn’t include the paperwork, which one Tennessee principal estimates to take him four extra hours a day.

I don’t mean to single out Tennessee as a locus of miseducation. My own experience one year was illustrative. We were preparing for our school’s re-accreditation and had foolishly volunteered to establish “measurable goals” to reach as part of the process. We came up with goals and “measurements” as required. When interviewed by the school’s Measurement Honcho, I said that these “measurements” didn’t measure what we claimed they did, and that what they did measure, they measured badly. My warning and advice were disregarded. When the re-accreditation team finally visited and then issued its preliminary report, it found that our “measurements” did not measure what we claimed they did, and that what they did measure, they measured badly.

Such inadequacy seems so obvious in retrospect that one wonders what is the difficulty in looking ahead. I have some thoughts. First, the impetus to reform in education is big on the vision thing but not on the thinking thing. Second, it takes place over far too little time to allow the careful thinking that is needed. This includes genuine consultation, not poll-taking that gets tabulated and ignored. Third, it relies on slogans, to which educators are terribly susceptible. Fourth, it dismisses or attacks criticism that is at odds with prevailing views. Fifth, it forgets that patience is a virtue and that without it the monkey will not be caught.