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By Susan Ohanian
Maybe it’s because I live in Vermont and drive on dark country roads, I
know first hand what it’s like to take out a deer while it takes out
the radiator, but I found myself fascinated by an NPR segment on
January 11, 2005, titled Opinions regarding whether deer whistles
actually help prevent accidents.
National Public Radio reporter Chris Arnold described what happens:
“[Y]ou put this little whistle on the outside of your car and when you
drive, the wind blows through it making the sound. That supposedly
wards off deer, but since the odds are that you’re probably not going
to hit one anyway, it’s kind of tough to tell if it’s working. Still, a
lot of people swear by their deer whistles.” A couple of rustics
expressed their enthusiasm for the deer whistle, offering the evidence
that since they’d never hit a deer, clearly those little plastic
whistles on the front of their cars must work.
But then we heard a different view. Skeptics noted that the
high-pitched sound made by the whistle is very similar to the sound
cars make. Next came the science: Tim Lawhern is a hunter education
administrator for the state of Wisconsin. While working on a degree in
wildlife ecology, Lawhern did a small study on deer whistles. He
approached various species of deer and elk at a deer farm and blew
three different kinds of deer whistles at them to gauge their response.
He described their responses as follows: None, zero, zip, nada, zilch.
You have to love an administrator who can summarize his scientific results as None, zero, zip, nada, zilch.
The chief scientist for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety also
insisted that there’s no evidence that deer whistles work. Nonetheless,
NPR reports that State Farm Insurance agents hand out thousands of deer
whistles to car owners and some police departments and major delivery
companies also use them.
And in rural Hudson Falls, New York, truck driver Blade Howard said
he’s got all the proof he needs that his deer whistle works. “I’ve
never hit a deer and I’ve seen them and I know it catches their
attention . . . .”
NPR’s Arnold noted that “Howard says the question comes down to who are
you going to trust, some scientists who did a couple of small studies
or people in rural areas like him who drive around deer, hunt deer, and
know deer? And without more research, his opinion just might be as good
as anyone else’s.”
Indeed! Teachers should take this as a lesson: Who are we going to
trust about reading methodology? The work of members of the Reading
First panel of experts who pass out edicts on what reading materials
can be used in Title 1 classrooms includes these small studies:
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Study of the brain of dead dyslexics
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Comparison of Chinese and English word identification processes
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Use of functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the
influence of sex hormones on cognitive development during puberty.
Members of the Reading First panel of experts don’t hang around with
children, don’t listen to children or know the literature they love.
Instead, they conduct small studies.NPR is comfortable with the wisdom
of truck drivers standing up against “small studies” provided by
science. It is time for teachers to behave like truck drivers and stand
against t the Reading First mandates for scripted reading. It is time
for NPR and the rest of the media stop calling the studies underlying
Reading First mandates “scientific.” Call them what they are: small.
Just as Doctor Spock revolutionized child care by advising parents,
“You know more than you think you do,” we teachers need to remind
ourselves that the science refuting what we know in our bones consists
of very small studies on the brains of cadavers.
Beware of the Progressive Stalking Your School
The way the media publicizes policies and pronouncement coming out of
think tanks, one might think these proclamations are based on big
studies. Not so. Even worse, too many people who should know better
figure if the conservative think tanks offer damaging policy about
public schools, then those think tanks labeled liberal must offer good
policy. These days, when you look at policy briefs, it is very
difficult to tell a neo-con from a neo-liberal. Take a look at The
Progressive Priorities Series: Ensuring a High-Quality Education for
Every Child by Building a Stronger Teaching Force issued by the Center
for American Progress. These fellows call themselves progressives, but
you will have a hard time figuring out just how their recommendations
differ from rhetoric spewing forth from Education Trust and the Thomas
B. Fordham Foundation.
The Progressive Priorities Series: Ensuring a High-Quality Education
for Every Child by Building a Stronger Teaching Force is available at
http://www.americanprogress.org
Below are a few excerpts from the 24-page report. As you read the
excerpts consider the way they are stuffed with bloated and deceptive
rhetoric, words that hide more than they reveal. And notice how they
are the same overstuffed words used by think tanks labeled conservative.
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American Progress supports a federal education agenda that builds the
capacity of public education to teach all students to higher levels and
graduate more of them ready for success in postsecondary education.
Investing in our teacher workforce will be a critical component in
building that capacity. . . .
The highest caliber and most desirable candidates should be vigorously
recruited and effectively trained. Once they are on the job, teachers’
skills should be more systematically developed through staged career
pathways, with more opportunities to be trained in clinical settings,
greater support and better evaluation during a residency period,
greater choices to advance along a meaningful career ladder as they
become more expert over time, and with better pay through competitive
compensation structures for all teachers that recognize and reward
different roles, responsibilities, knowledge, skills, and, most
importantly, positive results. .
Fortunately, the time is ripe for federal education policy to focus
intensively on building the teaching profession. Strong, private
efforts have coalesced around this issue, resulting in bipartisan
agreement around key principles. Federal policy already supplies a
foothold for efforts to build teacher quality. The No Child Left Behind
Act of 2002 requires that states work to ensure that all teachers are
highly qualified by 2005-2006. [A] new consensus about the importance
of teachers has emerged among researchers and policymakers, based on
results of groundbreaking research released over the past decade. Using
finer-grained information based on annual growth in individual
students’ test scores, such research has demonstrated that school
factors play a decisive role in how much students learn. The factor
that matters most is teacher quality. . . .
Federal education policy must make a focused commitment to building a
highly qualified, adequately supported, and more professionalized
teacher workforce for America’s schools. The long-range goal should be
to maximize the return on the nation’s investment in teachers by
systematically and consistently promoting practices that treat teaching
as a true “clinical practice profession” much like medicine. . . .
We consistently fail to attract and retain the brightest candidates at
every point in the professional pipeline to teaching. . . .
Using Data for Better Decisionmaking. We must work to increase the
amount, meaningfulness, and quality of information about America’s
teacher workforce, and encourage the use of such data for greater
accountability and smarter decisionmaking. The federal government
should demand better information about America’s teachers, and provide
enough support to enable school systems to provide it. Improved data
with respect to teacher credentials and performance can be used to
improve instruction and help rectify inequities in student
opportunities for learning.
To offer some examples: in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the district uses
value-added data to identify highly effective teachers and then
provides them with incentives to teach in the highest need schools.
This type of data analysis can also be used to identify a teacher’s
weaknesses so professional development can be provided in those areas.
Conversely, a teacher’s strengths can be identified (e.g., data may
demonstrate that a particular teacher is exceptionally good at teaching
fractions) and that teacher can be used as a resource for teachers
needing coaching in those areas. . . .
The federal government should support the development of enriched
career advancement structures that treat teaching as a clinical
practice profession like medicine.
The president should ensure that funds are going to support efforts to
take on the politically more challenging task of raising standards for
entry to the profession.
For example, funds under section 202 of the
Higher Education Act should be directed toward states seeking to raise
teaching licensing standards and improving licensing tests. In
addition, the president should seek to reserve $10 million in funding
under Title II of the Higher Education Act for an independent body—such
as the National Academy of Sciences—to develop national standards for
teacher quality with respect to content and pedagogy. . . .
The Congress also should create a $100 million fund to support
development of instructional tools, including a uniform curriculum and
standardized assessments that teachers can use to inform their
instruction. States or consortia of districts and regional education
agencies would be eligible. Research shows that urban districts making
the greatest gains in student achievement provide a uniform curriculum
or learning benchmarks aligned with state standards and tests, aligned
model lessons, aligned benchmark assessments teachers or schools may
administer at regular intervals, and prompt data on student performance
under those diagnostic assessments. . . .
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Oh my, where do we begin with such bloviating? First, let’s look at the
words. Unpack the agenda behind these terms and you see they serve a
corporate-political agenda, not the needs of children. For starters,
anyone who wants teaching to be more like medicine hasn’t had the
misfortune to spend time in a hospital lately.
- progressives
- all students
- higher levels
- most desirable candidates
- effectively trained
- skills. . . systematically developed
- staged career pathways
- clinical settings
- meaningful career ladder
- competitive compensation structures
- reward. . .positive results
- groundbreaking research
- finer-grained information
- professional pipeline
- value-added data
- highly effective
- enriched career advancement structures
- clinical practice profession
- national standards for teacher quality with respect to content and pedagogy
- uniform curriculum
Then-IBM chief and current Carlyle group chair Lou Gerstner launched a
heavy push for data worship in the schools more than a decade ago, and
these armchair progressives have adopted the mantra whole hog. Here
they announce that such data collection may demonstrate that a
particular teacher is exceptionally good at teaching, say, fractions.
The data allow schools to make such a teacher a fraction coach, and
then all kids will learn fractions. The policy writers stop short of
creating competition for a Fraction Teacher of the Decade. And so far
they haven’t lobbied for apostrophe queens. But stay tuned. Anyone who
claims that kids learn because teachers teach is at best naïve and at
worst delusional.
I’m not disparaging the importance either of good teachers or of
fractions, but the progressives’ total worship of data derived from
standardized test results is chilling. Warehousing data is the first
step to warehousing children so their streamlined curriculum can be
delivered efficiently. Progressives want career ladders (based on
student test scores) because, they say, “experienced teachers need
incentives to remain” and “compensation systems that recognize the
value of teachers coupled with career advancement systems that more
effectively reward good performance—based on results—and respond to
poor performance will make larger investments in teacher salaries more
politically viable and maximize the returns on such investments.”
Standardized test scores to measure the value of teachers.
We need to stop blaming everything bad on conservatives; we need to
challenge progressives for sitting high on the corporate bandwagon.
Recognizing their weasel words for what they are is a first and
necessary step to challenging their deeds. It is outrageous that
progressives would demean who we are and dictate what we should become.
Think about what is being valued here. This scheme will destroy the
teaching profession, turning it into one more competitive scrambling
for another dollar.
The Change-Up
As an antidote to the pseudo-progressive claim for the teacher as a
competitive climber on the career ladder, we can turn to a baseball
metaphor. Slate.com contributor Eric Liu traveled the country looking
for life lessons from 15 mentors— race-car drivers, Indian potters,
ballet dancers, rappers, research scientists, law professors,
Montessori teachers, aerobatic pilots, master carpenters, and many
others., Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Our Purpose in
Life (Random House 2004) is the result.
From pitching coach Bryan Price of the Seattle Mariners Liu learns that
“a teacher of pitching is ever operating on two levels, a surface
curriculum about how to pitch and a curriculum beneath about how to
be.” Liu concludes that “Failure, in many ways, is the default setting
in baseball. A pitcher can be on a roll and cruising through a game,
but he is always just one bad pitch, or one fielding mistake, away from
a meltdown. The thing Bryan Price teaches is not how to win all the
time. What he teaches is how to right yourself when you falter or fail.”
Isn’t this a large part of teaching? We need to stop listening to the
rhetoric about winning all the time. We need this message: How to right
yourself when you falter or fail.
Price chose to teach Liu the change-up, and though there were a myriad
of skills that Liu didn’t know, Price settled on just one: “Keep your
head quiet,” he said.
This meant making sure I held my head steady and square as I pitched,
so my eyes would remain fixed on the target. It also meant not
overloading my brain with anxiety and data. A quiet head in the
psychological sense is hard to achieve. Bryan got me there by
emphasizing a quiet head in the physical sense. By worrying only about
keeping my gaze steady and my skull centered, I stopped overthinking.1
A quiet head. With the data processors working overtime on the
standardized test outputs, and the data warehouses piling up facts
faster than rabbit poop, all the Standardistas are overthinking;
teachers need to stop listening. They need to gaze steady and keep
their skulls centered.
Once this skill is learned, then teachers should get mad as hell and start resisting.
1 National Public Radio, Day to Day, Slate’s Teachings: Big-League Pitching Skills. January 13, 2005
http:// www.npr. org/templates /story/story .php ?storyId= 4282749 |
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