OpEd on Common Core State Standards, Education and Juvenile Justice

You can check out my OpEd in the Chicago Tribune here where I articulate some of the successes and challenges of teaching the Common Core State Standards in my alternative education setting. Thanks to Teach Plus Chicago and the national Teach Plus team for helping me field the OpEd.

Professionalism and Assessment in Education: A recommended solution for a more professional approach to Performance Task Grading in Urban Schools

In the educational industry it is essential at times to demonstrate to a skeptical public the professionalism in education. Traditional and social media outlets recently have derided the educational profession. Much of this criticism is due to the tumultuous implementation of reforms driven by local, state, and federal governments over the past few years which disrupted traditional structures of education. It should be the goal of teachers to try to be honest with ourselves and our profession and embrace this moment as a time to steer the conversation away from negative pushback on accountability and student outcomes. Instead let’s take the opportunity to build a consensus of acceptance of the new reality and find solutions that we can come up with that meet and exceed the expectations our country, state, or district have now placed upon us. The more professional we are the more we legitimize education to skeptics of public education and assert more control over our profession. This is especially pertinent in regards to teacher evaluations and assessment, which is now inextricably connected with one another due to the Race to the Top reforms of the past five years and NCLB .

Many districts and states throughout the country have high stakes testing for students with serious implications for student and teacher evaluations based on growth and effectiveness. It is true that most states and districts have adopted multiple measures for student growth and teacher effectiveness. Education managers look to these scores to make important decisions including student placement in magnet or special schools as well as retaining or letting teachers go due to effectiveness, or lack thereof. It is necessary to analyze how assessments are scored and what measures constitute growth in order for these high stakes tests and evaluation systems to improve teaching and learning instead of being another failed reform effort. For large districts across the country, including Chicago Public Schools, these scores have serious ramifications for teaching practices and much is at stake, especially for teachers in regards to evaluations. Most are aware of the heated debate concerning the role assessments have and how  scores are used due to the reforms adopted by Race to the Top federal funds. For example in CPS 25% of teacher evaluations are based on student outcomes which are comprised of teacher graded performance tasks and standardized tests given at the beginning and end of the year. These outcomes will be used to give value-added scores to teachers in order to measure effectiveness and in turn reward successes or warn ineffective teachers so that they can improve. This type of accountability is new to many teachers throughout the country, but due to new laws it is now an inevitable part of teaching, so it is best that teachers stop fighting this accountability and instead focus their attentions on raising the professionalism of education by leading the conversation on how teachers should be accountable, especially in assessment.

To have a more honest, transparent accountability structure it is important to note that often teachers are in charge of scoring their own performance tasks of their students at the beginning and end of the year in order to measure growth. The problem with this structure is that despite the rubric and professional expectations, teachers are still sometimes tempted to score students lower on the first performance task at the beginning of the year and then score the students higher at the end of the year to show growth. This may not happen at all, but it still gives the impression that there could be a lack of professionalism due to its tendency for subjectivity. One approach that would give more credibility to performance task scores is to have other teachers in a district anonymously grade other teachers’ students in a sort of swap. One way to do this effectively is to have teachers volunteer or be selected by the administrator(s) in a building based on previous history of high quality teaching and consistent positive student results. These effective teachers could receive a stipend for their work and could be department or grade level leads. These teachers would be given the responsibility of scoring performance tasks that have similar grade levels and demographics as their students. The teachers would have a different group of students to score at the beginning and end of the year and could receive specialized professional development at the beginning of the year to ensure that scoring is honest, transparent, and effective. This group of teachers would also be having their students’ performance tasks scored by others and it would be anonymous so there would be no fear or distrust of this process.

This would be a more transparent and honest scoring system that rewards effective teachers with additional responsibilities that include some compensation for their work on scoring performance tasks. It also provides an avenue for honest assessment that promotes teachers truly looking at their instruction and student outcomes instead of giving in to the pressures of high stakes testing by being transparent in the assessment process. It has an added bonus of providing another layer of professionalism to the educational sector. There are many complaints about teachers wanting to receive taxpayer dollars but unwilling to show results where most other professions are taken more seriously because they are results-oriented.

In our current educational milieu assessment is inextricably connected with teacher evaluations. In order for educators to teach effectively and students to learn successfully it is essential to reward effective teachers by giving options and financial incentives to receive more responsibility so they can remain in the classroom instead of being tempted to move to an administrative or district-level job. This is one approach that if applied will help retain high quality teachers by providing ladders of responsibility that can enable them to continue to be leaders without leaving the classroom.

Brief Thoughts on Criminal Justice...

For a good read on our adult criminal justice system check out Michele Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (click here for an overview). You don't have to agree with all the views to admit that if our country has more African Americans and other minorities locked up now than in the height of South African Apartheid than we have a moral dilemma that must be grappled with. To me that is a problem that we all should explore and policy makers must address. For me it is an enormous human rights issue and based on my Christian convictions cannot be ignored. 

I am a person with strong religious convictions and I believe that since people are made in the image of God they should be treated humanely, even if they committed atrocious acts. This compassion Jesus demonstrated when people brought the adulterer to Jesus in John 8, "Whichever one of you has committed no sin may throw the first stone at her." I don't condone any crime and it is the job of the courts to judge offenders based on the facts, but I still have compassion on others and do my best to treat people with human dignity and respect based on the fact that all people are made in the image of God no matter who they are. Even if people are found guilty and serve prison time, they are still people who deserve the opportunity to contribute positively in society. What do you think…?

Reflections on Juvenile Justice from Someone in the Front Lines...

"I am getting 15 years on Monday Mr. Miner" was a statement my student said recently. The student is 15 years old and is looking at this amount of jail time at his young age. On his 17th birthday his present is that he will be woken up, shackled, and then transported to the Cook County Jail and placed in general population of the adult facility that is notoriously overcrowded and the largest county prison in the country. Happy Birthday!

By the way, I try not to pay attention to the cases of my students and I don't watch local news because I teach at a Chicago Public School located in a county temporary juvenile detention center. The students that are on the news will end up in my school and perhaps in my classroom and it is better for me to teach them as a student without bias or preconceived notions. I do know the student who made the comment above is not in jail for murder. Are we rehabilitating Juveniles or abandoning them and letting them be lifetime offenders who will be incarcerated for most if not all of their lives?

Illinois is in the process of changing laws for Juveniles to have them stay in Juvenile facilities until they are at least 18 (see brief here from the Illinois Juvenile Justice Coalition about this law in the process in Springfield). I am not advocating being soft on Juvenile crime. As a matter of fact as a person who teaches and interacts with juvenile offenders daily as well as a Chicagoan who is raising a family within city limits I am definitely for a strong Juvenile Justice system, the question is what is the goal of this system? Is it rehabilitation or punishment? Instead it seems that the system does both at the same time and then ends up with doing neither well. When we figure out that rehabilitation and restorative justice is the goal of the Juvenile Justice system, so that we have less teens becoming adult offenders, we will be heading in the right direction. But by that time my student, who will not be getting out for 15 years, will have already left the system briefly and then returned as a repeat adult offender because our system was not sure if we were punishing him or rehabilitating him. In my opinion I don't think you can do both.

Living Life through Second Life...

Imagine meeting people online via an immersive virtual environment for work, play, or romance. This happens every day. Second Life is the most influential of virtual worlds in our current technology landscape. 

PBS Frontline did a great documentary called Digital Nation (click here for the video link). They spent time on virtual reality in different circumstances including its application in the health and wellness for soldiers who struggle with PTSD, Internet addiction and video games. The documentary also spend a significant amount of time reporting on Second Life, the most famous of the all the internet virtual worlds. All of these links are worth viewing and I am sure there are many more articles, videos, and websites that can explore Second Life and its technology as well as philosophical implications.

Second Life is a disruptive technology. It provides an avenue for people to communicate, live a digital life with less restrictions or inhibitions, work from home, build personal and romantic relationships. It can be a considered an immersive social network that can be used for business but is in many ways more of a personal expression. I think that Second Life is already in decline and will be replaced by other new communication and/or social networking tools that will incorporate but not only be limited to virtual worlds. I think that Second Life has limitations in K-12 settings due to privacy issues, restrictions and the inability to manage Second Life from a teacher's point of view. It may have limited use as a teacher-centered technology tool. One recent study about Second Life in K-12 and Higher Education can be accessed here. I think Second Life will be gone in 3-5 years facing a similar fate as MySpace, which is currently in steep decline.

Storytelling goes Digital and the Future of the Web...

Dr. Thornburg’s idea of the rhymes of history basically states that many modern technological innovations echo previous ideas, experiences, and/or cultural interactions from humanity’s past. Digital storytelling through voicethread.com, storybird.com, or iPad apps such as StoryLines all attempt to captivate the visual, auditory, and textual elements of storytelling. The format for exchanging stories has changed throughout the years; however the purpose of the stories remains as a collective approach to share the human experience. Digital storytelling attempts to engage as many senses as possible as a way to recreate in a sense the storytelling around a fire among family, friends, and/or communities.

Kevin Kelly’s extrapolation of where the web is going in his TED Talk “The next 5,000 days of the web” here describes what it is evolving into a single, global machine and the web is its OS (operating system). All of us together make up this machine and the web, which has artificial intelligence but it is in and of itself not a singular consciousness or entity, rather it is made up of all of the people and things that are connected to it. He also contends that we will become codependent on this Web as we are currently dependent on the alphabet and writing. Instead of an alternate reality, this emerging web combines physical reality with digital reality. Kelly reverses McLuhan’s statement “Machines are the extensions of the human senses” to “humans are now going to be the extended senses of the machine”. These ideas reinforce the connections, consciousness, and collective consciousness of humanity and its perception of how it sees itself as a collective, interactive, and dominant force in the natural world. 

References:

Kelly, K. (2007, December). Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the Web [Speech]. Speech delivered at the EG 2007 Conference, Los Angeles. Retrieved fromhttp://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

Laureate Education (2010) Rhymes of History. Thornburg, D., Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=6200933&Survey=1&47=6076761&ClientNodeID=984645&coursenav=1&bhcp=1

Telephone Tetrad...

The telephone is an audio and communicative technology that revolutionized human relationships. Telephones enhance audio communication and human relationships, providing synchronous communication with one another that transcends location. The technology tool reduces or eliminates the for distance communicative technologies such as the telegraph, signal flags, among other things. It retrieves the ability to continue to communicate with others who are not in physical proximity to each other, therefore increasing connectedness of interpersonal relationships despite geographical separation. Video-conferencing technology tools such as Skype or VTok among the many others reverses the telephone’s technological breakthrough because it replaces it with synchronous audio-visual communication, which is in many ways superior to communication via exclusively audio because interaction has oral and physical characteristics such as body language.