The right curriculum for kindergarten: Play

Last year, as Harlem Village Academies prepared to open new elementary schools , our principals visited dozens of kindergarten classrooms. The upper-income schools focused mostly on active play, interesting discussions and crafts, including papier-mache projects that delighted children for hours. In the lower-income schools we saw regimented academics, reward-and-punishment behavior systems and top-down instruction. In one South Bronx classroom, the only time children spoke during the course of three hours was to repeat drills of the sounds of letters over and over.

Why the disparity? Many educators are placing the blame squarely on the Common Core — national learning standards recently adopted by 45 states and the District and supported by the Obama administration — and asserting that they lead to poor-quality teaching and take all the joy out of kindergarten.

One Brooklyn teacher who attempted to teach the Common Core told the New York Post that her kindergartners broke down in tears, anxious and frustrated. Early-childhood development experts such as Nancy Carlsson-Paige argue that the standards will lead to an increase in rote learning and a decrease in active play and exploration. If so, we should heed her warning.

The question, however, is whether the new standards should be blamed for poor quality instruction. It’s an important question, as the Common Core will be the reason for spending billions of dollars for new textbooks, state tests, teacher evaluation systems and more.

The standards were designed to elevate the quality of instruction in our country: to teach students to think independently, grapple with difficult texts, solve problems and explain their thinking in a clear and compelling way. This is a noble vision. But its attainment depends entirely on the execution. In fact, the authors of the Common Core write, “the standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach.”

Take vocabulary, for example. The Common Core standards state that kindergarten students should be able to “distinguish shades of meaning among verbs that describe some general action (e.g., walk, march, strut, prance) by acting out the meanings.” Imagine a classroom full of 5-year-olds marching, strutting, walking and prancing for 10 minutes to different kinds of music while laughing and learning vocabulary. Imagine, further, that this activity is organically integrated into a meaningful project or a theme-based unit that lights up the child’s love of learning. So while some schools might choose to teach vocabulary in a rote, boring way, clearly the standards are not to blame.

As Zoltan Sarda, an elementary school teacher with 22 years of experience, said to me last month, “The textbook companies are trying to box the big ideas of the Common Core into little disjoined pieces. But just because they are written in a linear way, that doesn’t mean you have to teach in a linear way.” Sarda, who now guides teachers at High Tech High in San Diego, once had his kindergartners build a life-size paper model of how humans would need to be designed in order to fly. This project taught them gravity, anatomy, speed, addition and subtraction, and measurement — all included in the standards — and the children loved it.

When I told one of our kindergarten teachers that there was a growing concern that the standards were ruining kindergarten, she laughed: “I didn’t know standards had that much power!”

So the standards are neither the problem nor the solution. The issue is how to use the standards to teach well. How do we do this at Harlem Village Academies?

First, we hire the smartest people out there and, when necessary, let go those who are not up to par. This is more important than ever, because the Common Core is immensely challenging and requires teachers to make intelligent, nuanced decisions about instruction during every lesson, every day. The only way to teach at this level is for every school to empower its principal to select, nurture and develop an outstanding faculty and then to hold the principal accountable for results.

In our schools, we prioritize teacher development over curriculum development. You do not make teachers better by handing them a packaged curriculum and sending them to a few days of training. Instead, teachers need time to analyze the standards, practice different teaching strategies, learn from mentors, collaborate with colleagues, observe one another, look at student work together, reflect on why certain approaches work better than others, learn from mistakes and continually improve. None of this is fast or easy. But it is how teachers become great.

Above all, we share a vision of engaging, sophisticated education. When a friend visited recently, she saw 27 children dancing in one kindergarten classroom. In another, she saw children singing a song about numbers. And in a third, the children were spread out in different parts of the room — some sprawled on the floor reading, some coloring and others playing with blocks. During our reading and writing period, each child chooses which learning activities to pursue that day. “This looks just like my son’s kindergarten,” she said. “But I pay $37,000 a year!”

Our classrooms are less structured and less orderly, sometimes even a bit chaotic. That’s how kindergarten should feel. Play is not a break from learning or a way to fill time for the little ones: play, imagination and discovery are how kindergartners learn.

Those of us who spend our years fighting for social justice should be as passionate about pedagogy as we are about politics. And that starts with equal access to a quality kindergarten education.

At one school district, the motto is BYOT - Bring Your Own Technology

iPhones, Nintendos and Kindles — devices synonymous with "fun" — are taking a new role in the classroom, thanks to a new trend in education called Bring Your Own Technology – or BYOT.

BYOT programs — like the one at Georgia’s Coal Mountain Elementary School — encourage students to bring in their own personal mobile technology — including iPads, Kindle Fires, netbooks — even gaming devices — to use during class.

“It’s really a simple thing,” says Tim Clark, District Technology Specialist for Forsyth County School District. “Kids have technology in their pockets and [are] taking them to school, but trying to hide them from teachers and from their parents. What we’re trying to do is have the kids take them out of their pockets and use [them] for instruction.”

Technology can be incorporated into lessons in various ways — serving as a research tool, providing access to educational games and allowing students to create multimedia presentations. Clark says students who don’t have their own devices, or opt not to bring them, can use district-owned laptops and electronic resources.

He says the program encourages participation and interaction because “it’s not a solitary type of activity where every child is buried in their device … it increases collaboration. It increases communication with the teacher. The teacher sees immediate feedback from the student’s work and the students are able to overcome other difficulties.”

Tracey Abercrombie, a fifth grade teacher at Coal Mountain, has been impressed with the program in general and praises the difference it has made with her special education students. “I’ve got one [student] who has trouble getting [information],” Abercrombie says. “He can get the ideas formed but there’s a bit of difficulty getting them out verbally. There’s something about typing it, having it come up on that screen. All of a sudden the barrier is gone.”

Clark says incorporating students’ personal devices in the classroom not only enhances learning, but teaches responsibility. “All of this is putting the responsibility on the shoulders of the students and [we’re] also trying to teach them and guide them to use their devices more effectively…not only taking care of their device and being careful not to drop it, but also wanting to make sure they know where it is at all times so it’s not stolen. [Using] it appropriately so they don’t post inappropriate pictures, so they don’t text inappropriate message to each other.”

Those involved with the program say students aren’t the only ones with something to gain from BYOT. For example, Clark says teachers “can learn alongside their students instead of having to determine all of the ways that their students should learn … they get to ask questions and discover all these new uses of the devices themselves."

Abercrombie agrees and has seen her teaching style change since the program began.

“I thought my role was give them all the knowledge that I’ve got about something and use that textbook and my knowledge together," Abercrombie said. "Now I realize that’s not my job at all. My job is to facilitate them. My job is to point them in the right direction, give them the tools they need and — wow — they can do so much more.”

Before launching BYOT in Forsyth County Schools, teachers and administrators explained the program’s structure and ground rules to parents and students. At first, Kara Laurie, who has two children at Coal Mountain Elementary, was apprehensive about allowing her kids to bring their devices to school. She says her initial reaction was that it “was a horrible idea … I had the normal parent concerns, you know, are things going to get broken? Are they going to get lost or stolen? And what about those kids that don’t have technology that they could take to school?”

But as the program got underway, she saw “how much the kids were able to do with it in the classroom. I found that it was a phenomenal idea.”

“We had to sit down as a class, as a team, and really define our rules because [the students are] used to using it any way at home,” Abercrombie says. “They’re used to … putting everything on Facebook, so we had to have a little talk about … different ways to use these devices in school.”

Amy Anderson, another parent of two, was comforted by the district’s approach to the program. Her fourth grader uses a netbook in class, while her first grader has a Nintendo 3DS. “The administration "set some very clear ground rules at the beginning and we had to sign an agreement as parents and they had to sign an agreement as students that they would only stay on,” Anderson recalls. The students "have to be on the school network which has all of the filters. If they don’t abide by those, if they use them when they are not supposed to, if they use them incorrectly, then they lose that privilege of being able to bring it in.”

In 2010, seven schools in Forsyth County School District began BYOT programs. This year, all 35 of the district’s schools are participating. While it is a relatively new idea, BYOT already exists in schools across the country, in states like Texas, Minnesota and Ohio.

Clark says the district has received positive feedback, along with interest in the program.

“I’m receiving messages from other districts that would like to come and see the implementation of bring your own technology in their schools … we recently held a tour of BYOT in our district … we had over 100 visitors on that tour. They were not only other districts, but also vendors wanting to understand how it’s impacting [the students].”

As far as student reaction, Clark says “the students love it…[they] have their devices, they’re learning how to use them in a more responsible way, and they’re being critical thinkers and very creative with their devices in ways that they never would have used them on their own.”

Competency-Based Schools Embrace Digital Learning

Tom Rooney sees competency-based education—supported by digital learning tools—as the path to building a better school district.

The superintendent of the 4,200-student Lindsay Unified School District in California, Rooney set in motion this school year a plan to move to a system in which students progress not on the basis of their age or a set school calendar, but by demonstrating proficiency on learning objectives.

Educators in the district are aware that the transition will undoubtedly hit some bumps in the road, as do most districtwide school improvement efforts. But school leaders entered the school year feeling well prepared because the district has been gradually putting competency-based education, or CBE, in place since the 2009-10 school year.

The move to competency-based education—also known as proficency-, standards-, and performance-based education—by Lindsay Unified and other districts will likely give them a head start in preparing for the new demands of the Common Core State Standards, experts point out, and in their ability to use technology more effectively to personalize learning.

“We have these practices that are ingrained in the traditional public education system that are not consistent with principles of learning and not consistent with how most of the rest of the world operates,” says Rooney.

“Prior to kindergarten, everyone learns to talk at a different time,” he continues. “They get potty-trained at different times, but suddenly when you get to kindergarten, you’re placed in this box, and you’re given the kindergarten curriculum because you’re five, not because you’re ready for it, or even if you already know it all. Kids learn in different ways on different time frames.”

National advocates for competency-based education echo those sentiments, pointing out economic and policy forces that are building momentum for such an approach.

“We’re in a place right now with the forces of global competitiveness, the adoption of common core, all of these new learning models, and the desire to do student-centered, personalized learning—you can’t really do that in a time-based system,” says Susan D. Patrick, the president and chief executive officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. The Alexandria, Va.-based iNACOL is a fervent advocate for competency-based education.

“Common core is a game changer because it’s going to allow us to be able to share best practices and knowledge of skills across states, and it’s going to keep the innovators that are developing online content from having to reinvent the wheel in 50 states,” says Patrick. The ability of states to collaborate will allow more districts to be able to implement pedagogies like competency-based education without having to start from scratch, she says.

Along with a number of other partners, such as the National Governors Association, MetisNet, Jobs for the Future, and the American Youth Policy Forum, iNACOL recently launched an initiative called CompetencyWorks that aims to promote competency-based education and provide resources for educators who are interested in learning more about the model.

The CompetencyWorks organizers hope to bring innovators together and help share their experiences with more schools and districts.

The concept is not new, but several factors have contributed to renewed interest in the structure, says Patrick.

“What’s different now is that [previously it] had to be entirely paper-based,” she says. “Now, with all of the new online and blended learning tools, teachers have a whole set of resources that can help them work with students on their learning goals. Teachers have a way to manage the personalization and allow the different pacing to happen in a very structured, goal-oriented way.”

In addition to helping teachers differentiate instruction for students, new technologies are giving rise to more powerful and detailed information systems that can help track students at the level of granularity that CBE requires, says Christine Sturgis, the founder of the Santa Fe, N.M.-based education consulting company MetisNet, one of the partners of CompetencyWorks.

“[CBE] creates an enormous amount of data about students and teachers and teacher effectiveness,” she says. New information systems are needed to make “data-rich and informed decisions,” adds Sturgis.

Based on conversations at a competency-based-learning summit held in March 2011,Sturgis and Patrick published a five-part working definition of CBE. Under the definition, students advance upon mastery, competencies are broken down into explicit and measurable learning objectives, assessment is meaningful for students, students receive differentiated support based on their learning needs, and learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include the application and creation of knowledge.

However, re-engineering schools to a competency-based model is not a silver bullet, and creating competencies must be done thoughtfully and carefully to be successful, Sturgis explains in a paper about designing competencies, published by CompetencyWorks.

“If the competencies, learning objectives, and rubrics are not designed well, students may become bored by low expectations, frustrated by high-level competencies without adequate scaffolding embedded in the learning objectives, or disengaged through inconsistent feedback from flawed rubrics,” the paper says. “Although it is obvious, it cannot be overstated: Well-designed competencies are one of the essential elements for high-quality competency education.”

‘Pace Does Matter’

Empowering students and making sure they know exactly what it is they should be learning and how it can be demonstrated is a key component of CBE, its advocates say.

“Learners really understand where they’re at and where they’re going next,” says Rooney, the Lindsay Unified superintendent.

To create their learning objectives, officials of his district brought together 30 teachers and about a dozen administrators to go through the California state education standards for grades K-12 and realign the information into need-to-know learning objectives. The district also worked with the Marzano Research Laboratory, run by educator Robert J. Marzano, to help design the new curriculum.

In addition, the group created a set of assessments to go with the curriculum to evaluate how well students learned the material.

After several years of tweaking those standards and piloting them in classes, the district moved to CBE officially in 2009-10 with the incoming class of 9th graders.

Teachers, who under the new system are now called learning facilitators, scrapped the traditional grading scale and moved to a 0-4 rubric, where a 3 is the minimum passing standard and 4 indicates that a student has gone above and beyond the requirements of mastery.

Although students in Lindsay Unified are still grouped into grade levels, each student is also grouped by a content level (readiness levels 1-13), so the learning facilitator knows exactly where every student falls in each subject area by content level. The district also built in more flexibility with scheduling so that students can move from one content level to the next without having to wait for the semester to end.

In addition, students receive frequent and meaningful feedback from their learning facilitators, Rooney says. In the new information system, teachers, students, and parents can check to see students’ exact progress in each content area at any point in time.

But just because students now learn at their own pace does not mean that students can take multiple years to get through one content level, emphasizes Rooney. “Pace does matter,” he says. “Our system is about increasing the rigor and holding everyone accountable—administrators, learners, and learning facilitators.”

Students who are more than two content levels below their grade levels receive individualized learning plans to help them catch up to their peers. Those students are allowed to test out of certain parts of the curriculum that they may already know to increase their pace.

Ultimately, though, what CBE comes down to is good teaching, Rooney says. Providing good feedback, making sure that students learn what they need to know before they move on, and differentiating instruction for each student is what good teachers have always done, he says.

The Boston Day and Evening Academy, an alternative high school in the Roxbury section of Boston that serves overage, undercredited students, has been using competency-based education since it opened 17 years ago, says the director of curriculum and instruction, Alison Hramiec.

The school, which does not use a traditional grading scale or group students by grade levels, has broken down each yearlong course into 11-week classes so that students have more flexibility to move from one class to the other.

“With this population of students in particular, they leave school, they have poor attendance, different situations arise, and they may fall behind in that class,” Hramiec says. In a traditional school, she says, “when they get back to school, everyone’s far ahead, and there’s no flexibility to get those kids caught up.”

But at the Boston Day and Evening Academy, students have the flexibility to start up where they left off, she says.

Like Lindsay Unified, the Boston Day and Evening Academy has spent several years aligning the curriculum with state standards and breaking it down into need-to-know competencies.

“You start with [the standards] and from there pull out what you believe are the enduring understandings,” says Hramiec. “Those are the big learning objectives that are the ones you want students to carry with them ten years from now.”

All students must demonstrate competencies independently and multiple times to move on, she says. They are given many opportunities to practice mastery informally before the actual assessment.

Protecting Innovators

One state that has taken the lead in competency-based education is New Hampshire, which in 2005 eliminated the Carnegie unit, a seat-time-oriented way of accounting for students’ academic progress. Schools in the state were given until the 2008-09 school year to move from a time-based to a mastery-based system.

Those regulations extend to the statewide online public high school, the Exeter, N.H.-based Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, or VLACS, which has been competency-based since it opened in 2007.

When students take and complete courses at VLACS is flexible, allowing students to move at their own pace. They can complete courses in 10 weeks or take as long as 36 weeks, says Steve Kossakoski, the chief executive officer of the school.

Students must score at least a 75 or greater on all competency-based assessments, out of a possible 100, in addition to receiving a passing average score on all the assignments (not just the ones pegged as competencies) in order to pass.

To help brick-and-mortar schools in the state meet the mastery-based requirements, VLACS has begun offering competency-recovery classes for students in regular schools who have fallen behind.

“In a traditional school, one of the things they’ve struggled with is what do you do with a student who hasn’t met competency in a world where everything is attendance-based?” says Kossakoski. In the competency-recovery courses that VLACS offers, the courses are broken down into smaller units so students only need to go through the parts of the class that they didn’t pass the first time.

Interest in the competency-recovery classes has jumped from about 200 students the first year it was offered to 1,400 students in the last school year, says Kossakoski.

The Washington-based Council of Chief State School Officers has brought together nine states, including New Hampshire, in its Innovation Lab Network to build new models of education that empower learners. Members of the network challenge the status quo with six design principles for transformation, one of which is performance-based learning.

“We want [states] to wrap around [innovative schools and districts] and protect them like a cocoon,” says Gene Wilhoit, the president of the CCSSO.

The Common Core State Standards have helped pave the way for innovative learning models such as CBE, says Wilhoit.

However, while innovation is happening in pockets around the country, large-scale statewide movements are rare, he says.

To push that progress along, the Innovation Lab has identified diagnostic tools that need to be developed and more effective intervention strategies for teachers.

One of the most recent states to join the CCSSO’s Innovation Lab is Iowa, which has begun to explore the idea of competency-based education. It granted districts in the state access to seat-time waivers after a forum about CBE held in December 2011.

The 500-student Collins-Maxwell Community School District, about 40 miles north of Des Moines, is one that has taken advantage of the change in policy.

“Competency-based education challenges some of the structures that we think may be there to support students, but may actually be limits,” says Jason Ellingson, the superintendent of the rural district, who also sits on the state’s task force on CBE.

Although the district has not rolled out a proficiency-based education system, it is taking steps to encourage organic growth of the model, officials say.

For instance, this school year, the district will be giving out iPads to all of its K-12 students. While elementary school students will leave the devices at school overnight, middle and high school students will be allowed to take the devices home with them.

“We feel that those tools are going to be pushing the idea of personalized learning, and we think that’s going to help the discussion around competency-based education,” says Ellingson.

Class Time Increases In 5 States In Effort To Improve U.S. Public Education

Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.

Five states were to announce Monday that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.

The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long-term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools – especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.

A mix of federal, state and district funds will cover the costs of expanded learning time, with the Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time & Learning also chipping in resources. In Massachusetts, the program builds on the state's existing expanded-learning program. In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy is hailing it as a natural outgrowth of an education reform law the state passed in May that included about $100 million in new funding, much of it to help the neediest schools.

Spending more time in the classroom, education officials said, will give students access to a more well-rounded curriculum that includes arts and music, individualized help for students who fall behind and opportunities to reinforce critical math and science skills.

"Whether educators have more time to enrich instruction or students have more time to learn how to play an instrument and write computer code, adding meaningful in-school hours is a critical investment that better prepares children to be successful in the 21st century," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement.

The project comes as educators across the U.S. struggle to identify the best ways to strengthen a public education system that many fear has fallen behind other nations. Student testing, teacher evaluations, charter schools and voucher programs join longer school days on the list of reforms that have been put forward with varying degrees of success.

The report from the center, which advocates for extending instruction time, cites research suggesting students who spend more hours learning perform better. One such study, from Harvard economist Roland Fryer, argues that of all the factors affecting educational outcomes, two are the best predictors of success: intensive tutoring and adding at least 300 hours to the standard school calendar.

More classroom time has long been a priority for Duncan, who warned a congressional committee in May 2009 – just months after becoming education secretary – that American students were at a disadvantage compared to their peers in India and China. That same year, he suggested schools should be open six or seven days per week and should run 11 or 12 months out of the year.

But not everyone agrees that shorter school days are to blame. A report last year from the National School Boards Association's Center for Public Education disputed the notion that American schools have fallen behind in classroom time, pointing out that students in high-performing countries like South Korea, Finland and Japan actually spend less time in school than most U.S. students.

The broader push to extend classroom time could also run up against concerns from teachers unions. Longer school days became a major sticking point in a seven-day teachers strike in September in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel eventually won an extension of the school day but paid the price in other concessions granted to teachers.

Just over 1,000 U.S. schools already operate on expanded schedules, an increase of 53 percent over 2009, according to a report being released Monday in connection with the announcement by the National Center on Time & Learning. The nonprofit group said more schools should follow suit but stressed that expanded learning time isn't the right strategy for every school.

Some of the funds required to add 300 or more hours to the school calendar will come from shifting resources from existing federal programs, making use of the flexibility granted by waivers to No Child Left Behind. All five states taking part in the initiative have received waivers from the Education Department.

A valid way to use ‘value added’ in teacher evaluation

Whether and how value-added models for teacher evaluation — which use student standardized test scores to assess teachers — only becomes more controversial in education as time goes on. Here is a new approach on the subject from Douglas N. Harris, associate professor of economics and University Endowed Chair in Public Education at Tulane University in New Orleans. His latest book, “Value-Added Measures in Education,” provides an accessible review of the technical and practical issues surrounding these models. This appeared on the blog of the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute. 

Now that the election is over, the Obama administration and policymakers nationally can return to governing.  Of all the education-related decisions that have to be made, the future of teacher evaluation has to be front and center.

In particular, how should “value-added” measures be used in teacher evaluation? President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative expanded the use of these measures, which attempt to identify how much each teacher contributes to student test scores. In doing so, the initiative embraced and expanded the controversial reliance on standardized tests that started under President Bush’s No Child Left Behind.

In many respects, The Race was well designed. It addresses an important problem – the vast majority of teachers report receiving limited quality feedback on instruction. As a competitive grants program, it was voluntary for states to participate (though involuntary for many districts within those states). The administration also smartly embraced the idea of multiple measures of teacher performance.

But they also made one decision that I think was a mistake.  They encouraged—or required, depending on your vantage point—states to lump value-added or other growth model estimates together with other measures. The raging debate since then has been over what percentage of teachers’ final ratings should be given to value-added versus the other measures. I believe there is a better way to approach this issue, one that focuses on teacher evaluations not as a measure, but rather as a process.

The idea of combining the measures has some advantages.  For example, as I wrote in mybook on about value-added measures, combined measures have greater reliability and probably better validity as well.  But there is also one major issue: Teachers by and large do not like or trust value-added measures. There are some good reasons for this: The measures are not very reliable and therefore bounce around from year to year in ways that have nothing to do with actual performance. There is more debate about whether the measures are, in any given year, providing useful information about “true” teacher performance (i.e., whether they are valid).

The larger problem is that policymakers have tended to look at the teacher evaluation problem like measurement experts rather than school leaders. Measurement experts naturally want validity and reliable measures—ones that accurately capture teacher effectiveness. School leaders, on the other hand, can and should be more concerned about whether the entire process leads to valid and reliable conclusions about teacher effectiveness. The process includes measures, but also clear steps, checks and balances, and opportunities to identify and fix evaluation mistakes. It is that process, perhaps as much as the measures themselves, that instills trust in the system among educators. But the idea of combining multiple measures has short-circuited discussion about how the multiple measures—and especially value-added—could be used to create a better process.

One possible process comes from the medical profession. It is common for doctors to “screen” for major diseases, using procedures that can identify all the people who do have the disease, but some who do not (the latter being false positives). Those who are positive on the screening test are given another “gold standard” test that is more expensive but almost perfectly accurate.  They do not average the screening test together with the gold standard test to create a combined index. Instead, the two pieces are considered in sequence.

Ineffective teachers could be identified the same way.

Value-added measures could become the educational equivalent of screening tests. They are generally inexpensive and somewhat inaccurate. As in medicine, a value-added score, combined with some additional information, should lead us to engage in additional classroom observations to identify truly low-performing teachers and to provide feedback to help those teachers improve. If all else fails, within a reasonable amount of time, after continued observation, administrators could counsel the teacher out or pursue a formal dismissal procedure.

The most obvious problem with this approach is that value-added measures, unlike the medical screening tests, do not capture all potential low-performers.  They are statistically noisy, for example, and so many low-performers will get high scores by chance.  For this reason, value-added would not be the sole screener.  Instead, some other measure could also be used as a screener.  If teachers failed on either measure, then that would be a reason for collecting additional information. (This approach also solves another problem discussed later.)

There is a second way in which value-added could be used as a screener – not of teachers, but of their teacher evaluators. To explain how, I need to say more about the “other” measures in an evaluation system. Almost every school system that has moved to alternative teacher evaluations has chosen to also use classroom observations by peers, master teachers, and/or school principals. The Danielson Framework, PLATO, and others are now household names among educators. Classroom observations have many advantages: They allow the observer to take account of the local context. They yield information that is more useful to teachers for improving practice.  And we can increase their reliability by observing teachers more often.

The difficulty is that these measures, too, have validity and reliability issues.  Two observers can look at the same classroom and see different things.  That problem is more likely when the observers vary in their training. Also, some observers might know teachers’ value-added scores and let those color their views during the observations – they might think, “I already know this teacher is not very good so I will give her a low score.”

Value-added measures might actually be used to fix these problems with classroom observations. To see how, note that researchers have found consistent, positive correlations between value-added and classroom observations scores. They are far from perfect correlations (mainly because of statistical noise), but they provide a benchmark against which we can compare (validate, if you will) the scores across individual observers.  Inaccurate classroom observation scores would likely show up as low correlations with value-added. Conversely, if observers were having their scores influenced by value-added, then the correlations might be very high, which might also be a red flag.

In these cases, an additional observer might be used to make sure the information is accurate. In other words, value-added can screen the performance of not only teachers, but observers as well. Used in these ways, value-added would be a key part of the system but without being the determining factor in personnel decisions.

Op-ed: Old-school job skills you won’t find on Google

IN October, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan made headlines with his pronouncement for fast-forwarding learning in America’s classrooms.

By putting a keyboard in every student’s hands and replacing printed textbooks with digital ones, Duncan predicted that U.S. graduates would become formidable competitors against their digital-savvy counterparts from countries like South Korea.

But what really happens when the Google Generation joins the workplace? While we agree much stands to be gained, what may be lost as education goes digital?

Our research tells us the razzle-dazzle of all that techno-mastery masks some deep and troubling deficiencies.

For instance, deep reading and retention are most at risk when books are replaced with online texts, according to the Director of Tufts University’s Center for Reading and Language Research, Maryanne Wolf.

And even though three-quarters of the teachers surveyed recently by Pew’s Internet & American Life Project reported that digital technologies have a positive effect on learning, more than half of them said online learning does more to distract students than it does to help them master academic concepts.

Findings from our recent federal study at Project Information Literacy (PIL), conducted in collaboration with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the University of Washington’s Information School, add another dimension to the digital learning debate — a cautionary tale.

When we did in-depth phone interviews with 23 U.S. employers at Microsoft, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, KPMG, the FBI, the Smithsonian and other organizations, we found that bright new hires dazzle interviewers with their digital skills.

Once they were on the job, however, it became apparent that today’s graduates lacked essential low-tech, traditional research skills like popping into a co-worker’s office for help in interpreting results or scouring printed reports that were sitting on a shelf.

Employers were dismayed to find that most of these college hires were tethered to their computers. They rarely went beyond a Google search and the first page of results looking for “the” answer to a workplace problem.

“Going through old records and stacks of paper, they don’t have enough patience to do that, to be able to decipher information out of an old book isn’t there,” said one employer, “but to find it on the Internet, find it on a website — it’s quick, it’s instantaneous, it’s already put into a synopsis for them when they bring it up.”

Our findings underscore the growing mismatch between what employers expect and need from college hires and what many of today’s graduates actually deliver.

Moreover, they confirm a new instinct for “instant information” among the digital generation. Yet these online searching techniques are simply not enough.

As we face the challenges of educating today’s students, we need to recognize that not all learning solutions are found online — and never will be.

In the race to bring ever more technology into the classroom we need to dial back and make sure students are also being taught old-school methods of communication and research that were second nature to previous generations.

Young people who are more comfortable texting than talking need to understand the value of conversation, whether by telephone or over the wall of a cubicle.

A conscious effort must also be made to introduce so-called “screen-agers” to the printed word, not out of some nostalgia for paper but because much pertinent and important information is still bound between covers.

A previous study by Project Information Literacy surveying 8,353 students from 25 campuses across the country, including the University of Washington, found that less than half had ever pulled a book from the library stacks or consulted a campus librarian when working on research papers.

We need to train students who consider all of the possible answers — not what comes up first in an online search that may call up dozens, hundreds or even thousands of results.

Such skills will go a long way to make graduates career-ready and the U.S. competitive in the 21st century. Or, as one employer we interviewed said, “those hires that are the most successful are the ones who can find that balance between the computing workplace and the person-to-person workplace.”

Alison J. Head is the founder and director of Project Information Literacy, an ongoing, national study about how college students find and use information in the digital age. She is a research fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate associate professor in the University of Washington’s Information School. The Institute of Museum and Libraries Services funded Project Information Literacy’s federal study, “Learning Curve: How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace.”

Could Competency-Based Learning Save the Common Core?

After spending last week in Washington, D.C., I was struck by how nervous folks in education circles are about whether states will stick with the Common Core state standards once the Common Core assessments arrive in the 2014-15 school year.

The behind-the-scenes buzz on Common Core touched on everything from how different the assessments really will be from what some states have today to whether Common Core will doom testing and the accountability movement more generally because of the length of the assessments to whether governors will stick with Common Core once the first year of assessment results come out and people see how students perform poorly on them.

I’m a proponent of states adopting Common Core state standards that are fewer, clearer, and higher in part because of the innovation their adoption could seed through the creation of a common market. Having common standards across the country could begin to reward content providers that target the long tail of learners because they would help to aggregate demand across the country, as opposed to what happens today where those providers that tailor their offerings to different and idiosyncratic state standards, for example, are rewarded.

What has struck me though is how after having agreed upon the standards, we seem to be going about the work of implementing the assessments for them backwards. I’m certainly no expert in this and this is genuinely complicated, but a story from Steve Spear’s research, as recounted in his book Chasing the Rabbit and which we wrote about in Disrupting Class, frames the point and my ultimate question.

While a doctoral student, Steve took temporary jobs working first on an assembly line at one of the Detroit Big Three plants and then at Toyota at the passenger-side front seat installation point.

In Detroit, the worker doing the training essentially told Steve, “The cars come down this line every 58 seconds, so that’s how long you have to install this seat. Now I’m going to show you how to do it. First, you do this. Then do that, then click this in here just like this, then tighten this, then do that,” and so on, until the seat was completely installed. “Do you get how to do it, Steve?”

Steve thought he could do each of those things in the allotted time. When the next car arrived, he picked up the seat and did each of the preparatory steps. But when he tried to install it in the car, it wouldn’t fit. For the entire 58 seconds he tried to complete the installation but couldn’t. His trainer stopped the assembly line to fix the problem. He again showed Steve how to do it. When the next car arrived, Steve tried again but didn’t get it right. In an entire hour, he installed only four seats correctly.

One reason why it historically was so important to test every product when it came off the end of a production line like the Detroit Big Three’s was that there were typically hundreds of steps involved in making a product, and the company could not be sure that each step had been done correctly. In business, we call that end-of-the-line activity “inspection.” In education, we call it “summative assessment.”

When Steve went to work at the same station in Toyota’s plant, he had a completely different experience. First, he went to a training station where he was told, “These are the seven steps required to install this seat successfully. You don’t have the privilege of learning step 2 until you’ve demonstrated mastery of step 1. If you master step 1 in a minute, you can begin learning step 2 a minute from now. If step 1 takes you an hour, then you can learn step 2 in an hour. And if it takes you a day, then you can learn step 2 tomorrow. It makes no sense for us to teach you subsequent steps if you can’t do the prior ones correctly.”

Testing and assessment were still vital, but they were an integral part of the process of instruction. As a result, when he took his spot on Toyota’s production line, Steve was able to do his part right the first time and every time. Toyota had built into its process a mechanism to verify immediately that each step had been done correctly so that no time or money would be wasted fixing a defective product. As a result, it did not have to test its products when they came to the end of the production process.

That’s quite a contrast between the two methods for training Steve Spear. At the Detroit Big Three plant, the time was fixed, but the result of training was variable and unpredictable. The “exam”— installing the seat—came at the end of Steve’s training.

At Toyota, the training time was variable. But assessment was interdependently woven into content delivery, and the result was fixed; every person who went through the training could predictably do what he had been taught to do.

The Detroit example represents how America’s factory-model public schools operate. They were in fact modeled upon factories built during the industrial revolution. The Toyota example illustrates more how a competency-based learning system would work. As I’ve written numerous times, this is how our education system should operate. Many psychometricians say that assessments can either drive instruction or be used for accountability but not both; the Toyota experience suggests otherwise if the assessments are implemented in a competency-based learning system in which time is variable and learning is fixed.

Consider now how we are implementing the Common Core assessments: summative assessments to measure what percentage of students failed. In essence, we are using them as an autopsy. This approach is, of course, an outgrowth of our factory-model system, which requires this sort of assessment; it is not an indictment against the assessment consortia per se. It is also arguably enshrined in federal law, as the Elementary Secondary Education Act requires that states implement yearly assessments, for example. But with the Detroit-Toyota story as background, let’s think about the three specific worries mentioned earlier: whether the new tests will be truly different; whether they will doom the accountability movement because of their length; and whether the states will stick with them after the first year of results. Would competency-based learning help to alleviate each of these concerns?

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia’s announcement that it is scaling back the performance items on its test adds fuel to the fire on the first concern, but at the same time David Coleman, a key thought leader behind the Common Core, and others on a panel at former Governor Jeb Bush’s National Summit on Education Reform went to great lengths to assure folks that the assessments truly would be different.

Of course, if there were instead systems of assessments in a competency-based learning system built for students to take an assessment on-demand when they were ready to demonstrate mastery on specific competencies, we would see a different picture develop with assessments that left no doubt that they were different. Perhaps there could be short assessments to verify basic objective mastery around a particular concept followed by rich capstone-like projects that could measure several competencies and be reviewed on an on-demand basis by an outside party, similar in some respects to how Western Governors University manages its assessments, for example (and yes, Western Governors’ assessments are designed by psychometricians).

The assessments could also presumably be more bite-sized and not interrupt learning in school for several days. As Education Week reported, “A key push in the latest redesign was to ensure that the test yields enough detailed information to enable reports on student performance in specific areas of math and English/language arts.” That’s in part because the assessments have to form an approximate measure of an entire year of curriculum. The summative test therefore has to be a certain length so that it can collect such statistically valid information. Smarter Balanced’s assessment, for example, will be roughly 6.5 to 8 hours long.

What’s most stunning about this test length is that this was a decrease in time from the length the test was supposed to be, according to this announcement. I don’t know if this tone-deaf length will doom the accountability movement more generally, as some worried in private in Washington, D.C., but I will also understand the complaints of parents if this goes forward.

As to the last question over whether governors will stick with Common Core after the first year of assessment results, we don’t really know. Many are speculating that on the heels of students’ and schools’ disastrous results on the assessments, states will simply “lower the cut scores” that determine proficiency, thereby masking the actual results and avoiding the political heat. That would hardly align to Common Core’s mantra of fewer, clearer, and higher, however. Others speculate that governors will just walk rather than deal with the continued expense and political headaches.

If we were instead using assessments in a competency-based learning system, however, then the equation would change. The learning objectives and assessments would be far more transparent to students and their parents, and they would understand why they had not passed a certain concept, as they could receive immediate feedback to inform what they would learn next—and understand the importance of true mastery. In many cases, students could move back down to an earlier concept from a previous “grade” that they might not have mastered if that made the most sense for them to move ahead ultimately and realize success, thereby avoiding the “Swiss Cheese” problem that is too prevalent in education today and that competency-based learning, such as that used in Toyota’s training, solves.

For those worried about accountability (and count me in that group), this would actually allow for a far more accountable and rigorous system, as we could have near real-time data about where each student was in her learning (and with much more visibility into where each student actually was because we would be testing students based on their actual level, not an assumed one based on their age) and see the progress and growth that a school was achieving with its population with a bottoms-up approach rather than today’s clunky top-down one.

We wouldn’t need to play all the games that we do today with summative assessments where we are constantly making difficult tradeoffs and relying on various statistical machinations to create valid and reliable instruments. Instead, the focus would be on true mastery, not “good enough” (to see why that’s a valid concern, check out Sal Khan’s chapter on testing in his book The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined).

To the credit of David Coleman and Dr. William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University and another of the key thought leaders behind the Common Core, at Bush’s summit they spoke about how Common Core could unleash competency-based learning. Indeed, Common Core and competency-based learning should be a natural fit, as the former creates learning maps for students to master that can shift the emphasis from time to mastery of deeper learning. Coleman and Schmidt also properly warned about the possibility that competency-based learning might mean students just zipping past concepts without truly mastering them (Tom Vander Ark has written about this concern more here).

At the same time, one of the things that has concerned me most about the Common Core is its language around age-based grades that imply the same factory model we’ve always had. At Bush’s summit, prior to someone asking about competency-based learning, Schmidt reinforced this worry when he in essence said that students should be working on the same things on the same day at the same age, and that it makes no sense for it to be otherwise because it’s not equitable.

I’m all for all students having an equal opportunity to be exposed to and master the same foundational concepts, as opposed to the way today’s system works (and by the way, the adoption of digital learning would go a long way in helping solve this), but at the same time, this mindset of age-based grades is dangerous and a terrible relic of today’s factory-model system that is anything but equitable. It helps keep a deeply flawed and inequitable system locked in place, which is why a couple hundred education leaders joined me in the summer of 2011 to encourage the development of a different view of assessments entirely (you can read the open letter here). What’s more, sticking to age-based grade bands could be Common Core’s undoing.

Common Core creates a huge opportunity for innovation and personalization and the implementation of a competency-based learning system. It’s an opportunity we shouldn’t waste. With the way things are moving now on the assessment front, however, there are real concerns that states will walk away from it en masse. Even if they don’t, there are real concerns that the assessments that will be put in place will stunt innovation and educational transformation, not encourage it. If we called a timeout though and shifted our mindset and our education system to a competency-based learning one—one in which new assessments could help drive the shift—might we see a different picture develop? Wouldn’t we worry less about states walking away from the Common Core in that picture?

Fostering Tech Talent in Schools

Leandre Nsabi, a senior at Rainier Beach High School here, received some bluntly practical advice from an instructor recently.

“My teacher said there’s a lot of money to be made in computer science,” Leandre said. “It could be really helpful in the future.”

That teacher, Steven Edouard, knows a few things about the subject. When he is not volunteering as a computer science instructor four days a week, Mr. Edouard works at Microsoft. He is one of 110 engineers from high-tech companies who are part of a Microsoft program aimed at getting high school students hooked on computer science, so they go on to pursue careers in the field.

In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a shortage of computer science graduates — one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation’s economy.

There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers. But despite the hoopla around start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, fewer than 40,000 American students received bachelor’s degrees in computer science during 2010, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates. And the wider job market remains weak.

“People can’t get jobs, and we have jobs that can’t be filled,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel who oversees its philanthropic efforts, said in a recent interview.

Big technology companies have complained for years about a dearth of technical talent, a problem they have tried to solve by lobbying for looser immigration rules to accommodate more foreign engineers and sponsoring tech competitions to encourage student interest in the industry. Google, for one, holds a programming summer camp for incoming ninth graders and underwrites an effort called CS4HS, in which high school teachers sharpen their computer science skills in workshops at local universities.

But Microsoft is sending its employees to the front lines, encouraging them to commit to teaching a high school computer science class for a full school year. Its engineers, who earn a small stipend for their classroom time, are in at least two hourlong classes a week and sometimes as many as five. Schools arrange the classes for first thing in the day to avoid interfering with the schedules of the engineers, who often do not arrive at Microsoft until the late morning.

The program started as a grass-roots effort by Kevin Wang, a Microsoft engineer with a master’s degree in education from Harvard.

In 2009, he began volunteering as a computer science teacher at a Seattle public high school on his way to work. After executives at Microsoft caught wind of what he was doing, they put financial support behind the effort — which is known as Technology Education and Literacy in Schools, or Teals — and let Mr. Wang run it full time.

The program is now in 22 schools in the Seattle area and has expanded to more than a dozen other schools in Washington, Utah, North Dakota, California and other states this academic year. Microsoft wants other big technology companies to back the effort so it can broaden the number of outside engineers involved.

This year, only 19 of the 110 teachers in the program are not Microsoft employees. In some cases, the program has thrown together volunteers from companies that spend a lot of their time beating each other up in the marketplace.

“I think education and bringing more people into the field is something all technology companies agree on,” said Alyssa Caulley, a Google software engineer, who, along with a Microsoft volunteer, is teaching a computer science class at Woodside High School in Woodside, Calif.

While computer science can be an intimidating subject, Microsoft has sought to connect it to the technologies most students use in their everyday lives. At Rainier Beach High recently, Peli de Halleux, a Microsoft software engineer, taught a class on making software for mobile phones.

The students buried their faces in the phones, supplied by Microsoft. They were asked to create programs that performed simple functions, like playing a random song when the phones were shaken.

Leandre, who took Mr. de Halleux’s mobile programming class last year and is in Mr. Edouard’s Advanced Placement computer science class this year, proudly showed off a simple game he had created, Sun Collector, in which players tilt the phone to dodge black balls and hit big yellow ones.

“I never really understood what was behind these games,” he said. “Once you start getting it, it’s pretty easy to understand.”

One of the most alarming trends for the technology industry has been students’ declining interest in computer science over the last decade.

While the number of bachelor’s degrees granted in computer science has been growing for the last several years, 2010’s figure, the most recent available, was still 33 percent lower than at the peak in 2004, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Student interest in the field began to fade after the dot-com implosion a decade ago. It has picked up again in recent years, but slowly.

Most educators believe that for students to be excited about computer science, it is critical to introduce them to it at an early age. Yet support for the subject at cash-short K-12 schools has faded. In almost every state, computer science is taught as an elective, rather than a core requirement.

The percentage of graduates who earned credits in high school computer science classes fell to 19 percent in 2009 from 25 percent in 1990, making it the only subject among science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses to experience such a drop, according to a report by the Education Department.

Those numbers are all the more surprising considering how attached teenagers are to their smartphones, tablet computers and Facebook accounts. But that fascination in most cases is with social communications and media, rather than the technology itself. Today’s easy-to-use gadgets have also concealed programming tools from users that were once far more prominent in computers.

Finding capable computer science teachers is also hard. Few other industries are as good as the technology business in its ability to divert would-be educators into far more lucrative corporate jobs. Mr. Edouard graduated from the University of Florida in 2011 and considered enlisting in Teach for America, but he also had multiple offers from technology employers.

“In today’s day and age, with so many college loans, it’s tough to go into teaching,” he said.

One of the biggest concerns about Microsoft’s effort is that most of its volunteers have little teaching experience. To comply with district licensing requirements and to help engineers with classroom challenges like managing unruly teenagers, a professional teacher is also in the room during lessons. One of the program’s tenets is that Microsoft engineers need to teach the teachers, alongside students, so that those instructors can eventually run an engaging computer science class on their own.

“We are taking the kids farther than I could do,” said Michael Braun, a teacher at Rainier Beach High who is working with Microsoft volunteers.

There are still hiccups, including tensions between some of the professional teachers and the Microsoft engineers assigned to work with them, according to several people involved in the program, who did not want to be named for fear of seeming critical of Microsoft.

Sarah Filman, a program manager at Microsoft, completed the intensive summer training that the company offers volunteers, preparing a lengthy PowerPoint presentation for the class she taught at a Seattle high school last year. “That’s the Microsoft way,” she said.

But as soon as she dimmed the lights in her classroom at the start of the year, her students had trouble focusing on the slide show, forcing Ms. Filman to change her methods. “I had to throw away a lot of what I had done,” she said.

For students in the Seattle area, Microsoft tries to drum up excitement in technology by organizing field trips to its campus and discussing the lucrative careers that await them. The students from Rainier Beach High who visited Microsoft last year were buzzing about their trips for days afterward.

“To me, that was an ‘aha’ moment,” said Dwane Chappelle, the principal of Rainier Beach High. “I said, we’ve got to find a way to get more kids involved.”

Mr. Wang, the program’s founder, said a professional from the tech industry who stands at the head of a class for a full year can be a powerful role model. “Kids can see themselves in their shoes,” Mr. Wang said. After all, he added, “their chances of going to college and majoring in computer science are exponentially better than getting into the N.F.L.”