This past Monday, the Wall Street Journal posted an opinion piece by Fran Tarkenton in which he postulated what the NFL might be like if it had to play by what he called “teachers’ rules.” Tarkenton says:

Tarkenton’s argument is not particularly new—the idea of performance or merit pay for teachers has been around for at least 60 years—but it is increasingly popular with the public. No Child Left Behind created a system for rating and ranking schools and districts, and recently there has been a move in a few cities like Los Angeles and New York to extend that system to individual teachers. Never mind that the scores are flawed at best; to those who believe intuitively that linking teacher pay to teacher performance can only be a good thing, Tarkenton’s essay is like an interception that was returned 99 yards for the game-winning touchdown.

Behind his arguments, however, are flawed assumptions and metaphors twisted to fit them. Let’s dissect his arguments and consider the real differences between the world of education and Tarkenton’s fantasy football.

1. Salary schedules. Tarkenton derides a “union-created system [which] provides no incentive for better performance,” preferring a purely performance-based system of pay. But the NFL itself has a salary schedule, bargained collectively with the NFLPA, which, guess what, dictates the minimum salary a player must earn based on their years of performance. A rookie in 2011 will earn no less than $375,000, while after ten years, a player at the top of the scale earns a minimum of $910,000. Repeat: those are minimums.
2. Funding. In 2009, all 32 NFL teams paid a combined $3.4 billion for player salaries. Revenues from stadium ticket sales for those teams were slightly over $7 billion for 1,700 players (53 per team). In contrast, according to the US Census Bureau, in 2009 there were more than 15,000 public school districts in the US, with almost $591 billion in revenue and $209 billion spent on 4.3 million teacher salaries. Thus, the education system has 469 times as many employers as the NFL but only 84 times the revenue paying 61 times the salaries for 2,500 times the employees.
3. Supply and Demand. According to the NCAA, there are an estimated 317,000 high school seniors playing football in a given year. Of those, only 250 (or less than a tenth of a percent) will get drafted into the NFL. When you get rid of a “bad” football player, there is a long line of potential replacements ready to fill the slot. Teaching is not nearly as competitive: there are places in every state where teachers are so in demand that the federal government offers bonuses to people willing to teach there. Many positions remain unfilled, or are filled by underqualified staff.
4. Results. In the NFL, evaluating quality is relatively straightforward. Teams with good players win, and teams with bad players lose. End of story. The same is actually roughly true in education: better learning happens where there are better teachers. But the analogy falls apart when you consider that the NFL is explicitly designed to elevate one “best” team every year at the expense of the other 31. But education’s goal is different: we want every child in every classroom to learn and meet a minimum standard of acceptable achievement. We won’t tolerate a competitive system where some kids win and most kids lose.
5. Coaching. Tarkenton says that in the NFL, as in “every other profession: if you’re good, you get rewarded, and if you’re not, then you look for other work.” If only it were really true: every Sunday there are thousands of armchair quarterbacks who would be very quick to give their opinions about which players are the bums that should be rushed out the door. But the reality is that in the NFL, if you’re not good, you are coached, you get intensive training and assistance and the opportunity to work your butt off to get better. And you get repeated opportunities over multiple attempts to prove your value to the team before you are cut.
6. Causality vs. Correlation. In the NFL, team scores are a direct result of the performance of the players on the field. Better players produce consistently better performances which result in consistently more wins. In education, although the teacher’s skills affect student learning, it is an indirect and fuzzy relationship. There are so many other factors involved that to load all of the responsibility and all of the consequences of the outcome onto one person is unreasonable and unfair. Correlation? Yes. Causal? Not so much.
7. Continuous Improvement. There is an assumption in education that schools and teachers will get better and better every year with no dips, no slumps, no gaps, and no plateaus. This isn’t realistic, at least not where humans are involved. Even the best NFL players can have a game or two where things don’t go well. Spectacular teams can even crash and burn–just look at this year’s Philadelphia Eagles, who were widely believed to have assembled some of the nation’s best talent, and started their season 1–3.

Let’s imagine what the NFL would really be like if it played by current education rules. Every town in the US would be required to have a professional football team. Every team would get nine months of practice leading up to one and only one game. Every team in the league would be expected to win that game every year, and in fact would have to increase its score year after year, or be labeled a “failing team.” Every resident of the town would be required to attend every game, whether they wanted to or not, and the town would hold a referendum to determine ticket prices.

Every player on that team would be expected to score a minimum number of points during the game or be labeled a failing player. Players who whined that they didn’t have the support of their teammates, or who had a poor coach, or played for a team that didn’t have money for footballs, would be told that those were just excuses, and that if they really were good players they could overcome those challenges and win anyway.

On the other hand, if Tarkenton’s fantasy of teaching like football really did come true, then rookie teachers would make $375K. Maybe he’s onto something after all.

Imagine picking up the newspaper and seeing this story:

Let’s stay in this alternate universe for a little while and see how our future citizens might tackle some typical real world problems:

1. You are the senior manager of a nuclear power plant that has been damaged in an earthquake. Radiation is leaking, and the core temperature is rising, rapidly approaching melt down. Do you:

a) Draft a press release minimizing the threat to the community?
b) File a law suit against the engineering firm that built the plant?
c) Turn the air conditioners on high?
d) Panic and cry?

2. You are the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and you just discovered that several of the country’s largest banks are in danger of failing catastrophically because of poor investments and questionable accounting practices. Do you:

a) Blame it on the previous administration?
b) Tell the Treasury Department to print up a whole bunch of new money to help the banks catch up?
c) Lower interest rates?
d) Panic and cry?

You get the idea. Real world problems don’t have a finite set of solutions from which we simply have to pick the best. Natural disasters, the economy, climate change, even our personal relationships are complicated and messy. Yet I already see in my own children a mindset where if they don’t know the obvious “right” answer to a problem, they wait for someone to give it to them—or at least to give them the possible options they can choose from.

You are likely familiar with the Chinese proverb about fishing. My wife and two of my sons went fishing last week while on vacation in Florida. In the course of about three hours, I caught one trout (on my first cast, no less), and my son caught a small catfish we had to throw back. There were several times that all of us were getting tired and frustrated and I just wanted to be able to jump into the water and hook something onto their lines for them.

Many of our classrooms can look like this. Teaching someone how to fish, or how to solve math problems, or how to read, can be complicated, frustrating, and tiresome. It is tempting to just show them shortcuts, and often we do.

The prep-and-test cycle can lead this way as well. As Diana Laufenberg said to me yesterday on Twitter,

(Thanks to Diana for also suggesting the idea that led to the title of this post.)

There is an expectation, reinforced by years of NCLB, that in education we can see steady, continuous improvement, and that the simple path to this improvement is better teaching by better teachers. It’s like driving a school bus: if we get a driver who is more effective, the bus will get to its destination more efficiently and the passengers on that bus will get further along the route.

The reality is much more complex and much more subtle. Teachers aren’t the bus drivers. Students are. And not only are they not in the same place on the route, they’re not all even on the route. In fact, they’re not all driving buses. Some have cars, some are on bikes, some are walking or even sitting in canoes. When a teacher gets involved in the process, it’s not a simple matter of turning the steering wheel, giving it gas, or applying the brake. We are more like guides who are explaining the map. We don’t have the luxury of seeing immediate results of our instruction, and in fact by the time results start to appear, we have likely given a great deal of additional instruction in the meantime.

I’ve used this school bus metaphor before, and will likely expand on it more in the future. The point here is that the reality of teaching doesn’t align with the expectation of immediate and positive improvement. Just like I got frustrated waiting to see results of our attempt at fishing last week and wanted to take shortcuts, teachers and administrators look for faster, more straightforward ways of getting the results that are demanded. So we also take shortcuts, training kids to take tests more effectively and more efficiently, filling their non-existent buckets with globs of information just waiting to be spewed out onto their test booklets like graphite measles. We sacrifice learning for performance, understanding for achievement, and innovation for indoctrination.

Shortcuts can only get short term results, and only by the tightly limited definition of “results” that is in vogue today: a test-score graph with a positive slope. Real world results mean solving real problems; messy, complicated, confusing problems where there might very well be no real solution. It doesn’t mean going by the book, it means writing an entirely new one. Results are about creating new things that never existed before, not about selecting the least inadequate of someone else’s mediocre options.

When I was in school, one of the tricks of the multiple-choice game that I was taught was, “When in doubt, choose C.” I suggest that we need a new answer:

I consider my blog a place to work out not-quite-crystallized thoughts and start conversations. This post is an example of a topic that I need to wrestle with, and I’m looking for your help to do so.

I wrote the other day about how Educon challenged some of my assumptions, and is continuing to do so. I have also been thinking about where I personally land on the school reform movement. Much of what the “reformists” say grates on me and feels wrong for kids, but I believe part of that is because it feels like a personal attack on my calling, my chosen profession, and my passion for helping kids learn. I also realized that my understanding of the movement is based primarily on what other people tell me it is. I have not spent enough time with the primary source material.

So I decided to check it out for myself. I visited the Students First web site, and read through the policy agenda posted there. (A caveat: I have not read the entire document thoroughly—what follows is based on the summaries at the site.) I was a bit surprised to find that they endorse many things that I believe are critical to improving education: putting students first, elevating the profession of teaching, striving for excellence, using public resources wisely to support learning.

Let me also say up front that I support the principle of accountability and for eliminating inequities in public education. I am not afraid of being held to a high standard of performance and getting constructive feedback and working at improvement when I don’t live up to that standard. (An aside: as an administrator, I am now faced with the challenge of how to provide that kind of feedback and help my teachers raise their game. I have not yet mastered that skill and am constantly reflecting on how I can do a better job.)

Digging into the Student First agenda a bit further, I realize that they have used language that it would be difficult to disagree with. It puts them in a powerful position to potentially argue, “If you oppose our movement, then you must not want to put students first,” or “you must be against elevating the teaching profession.”

Hardly. Where we differ though is on the assumptions behind the words. Let’s take the issue of student achievement. I absolutely want students to achieve. I also think that our students (speaking globally, not about my district in particular) probably aren’t achieving at the level they are capable of. So how can I possibly disagree with Students First?

I don’t. What I disagree with is their definition of achievement (which, by the way isn’t explicitly stated at the site, unless I missed it). By inference, and through my experience with NCLB, achievement to this organization means performance on high-stakes reading and math tests. If this inference is wrong, by the way, I welcome feedback from anyone familiar with the organization to point me to more thorough definitions of the term so I can better understand it.

Please don’t misunderstand: I want my students to have excellent reading and math skills. I just don’t believe that an annual, week-long, multiple choice test is adequate to judge these skills.

But I also think achievement is a more complex, more subtle thing than this, and I’m not certain Students First understands or is interested in this. Again, if I’ve mischaracterized the organization, show me—help me understand where I have it wrong, but to me their goal doesn’t really seem to be to help teachers get better, it seems to be to categorize all teachers as either “good” or “bad” and then to get rid of the bad ones.

The debate will never be resolved, and we will never be able to really communicate and work together to create the best possible education for our children, until we can agree on the definitions and assumptions that form the foundation of the goals. The conversation first needs to be about what achievement means, what excellence means, what quality means. Only then can we work on creating effective ways of evaluating it—and I’m certain those ways will involve multiple measures and multiple criteria.

We could, and should, examine much of the language on all sides of the debate about school reform to find the underlying assumptions. I know I am looking much more closely at my own, and I challenge you to do the same. What assumptions do you have that color your responses and drive your thinking? What am I not considering here that I need to be? Where are the points of agreement we can work from to build consensus?

Fresco at the Library of Congress

Thomas Jefferson invented public education, the purpose of which, he said in a letter to John Tyler in 1810, is “to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.” He believed that education of all children, not just those whose families could pay for it, was essential to the strength of the nation. Public education was intended to activate the potential of everyone.

Jefferson also reinvented the Library of Congress when he donated his personal collection. In a real and revolutionary sense, the LOC became the library of the people. In the South Reading Room, on the left half of the panel on the west wall, Jefferson’s view of Education is illustrated by the quotation:

My family and I visited Washington, DC, and toured the Library of Congress this summer. I was overwhelmed by its scope, not only in physical size, but in its mission: in part, to “sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.” Jefferson felt that freedom of access to all knowledge was a prerequisite for everything America was going to be about.

I also find it fascinating that Jefferson had a lofty vision of public education that would still be considered progressive today. To him, a differentiated, student-centered education is the cornerstone of freedom and happiness:

Critics of public education would have us abandon this vision for a privatized, competitive market driven by standardized measures of adequacy. I question the goal of this market. Instead of developing the minds and buried talents of its citizens, schools would be about manufacturing a productive, compliant workforce. They call this “reform,” but it’s really just a highly-refined version of the system we’ve been building for a hundred years. Consider for example that our curriculum is no longer designed, it is purchased (a topic I will be developing further in a future post).

Who in this new vision of education will be the guardian of the interests of the nation? The protector of freedom and enlightenment that Jefferson sought for the nation’s citizens? I’m afraid that instead of enabling people to see that it is in their interest to preserve peace and order, the only interest schools will promote is self-interest.

Students in Shanghai recently blew the international PISA test out of the water. Reformers are telling us it is a wakeup call for American education.

Personally, I don’t want the kind of school that produces results like this. According to an NPR story today, Chinese students are trained to perform on precisely these kinds of measures. Everything is rote. A middle school principal put it this way: “Why don’t Chinese students dare to think? Because we insist on telling them everything. We’re not getting our kids to go and find things out for themselves.” Performance on the university entrance exam is judged strictly on whether students have memorized the standard, acceptable answers to the questions. Creative, thoughtful answers are penalized.

Public schools are about the public interest. They are about empowering citizens, individually and collectively, to preserve and promote the freedoms and rights our founders argued and fought and risked their lives to establish. If we lose the “public” in school, we lose the public.

Fences exist to separate the things inside from the things outside. They provide a boundary to define and separate space, and safety for those inside.

Teachers and administrators put up both literal and metaphorical fences in schools. Rules, firewalls, expectations, codes of conduct. “They are for the protection of the students,” we say, and we believe it. We feel that schools should be safe places for our children, and we want to create an environment in which they can learn.

But what do our language, attitude, and focus say about these fences? Why are they there, and which side of the fence is in? These things matter, and they reveal a great deal about our schools.

Student handbooks, policy manuals, and our daily interactions with students are filled with words like these: don’t, can’t, control, confine, restriction, infraction, escalate, intervention, penalty, enforce, and impose. The chatter in the faculty room revolves around the “good kids” and the “bad kids”.

Think about the frame of reference where you are. Which term below represents the attitude and focus of the adults? What is the central principle around which the system is set up?

• Compliance or Citizenship?
• Conformity or Courtesy?
• Enforce or Encourage?
• Obedience or Respect?
• Restrictions or Boundaries?
• Don’t or Ought?
• Penalty or Result?

What are we really trying to protect? The students? Or the school?

There are consequences to our choice of vocabulary, our attitude towards kids, and the things we choose to focus on every day. Students pick up on these things, and their own behavior, attitude, and language reflect the environment they experience.

What are you and your school saying to your students? Does the environment communicate safety? The opposite is not, “You aren’t safe here.” It’s worse. It actually says, “You are dangerous.” Which puts them on the outside of the fence looking in. And that’s no place to learn.

One of the greatest learning experiences that my son had was while working on his Westinghouse Science (now Intel) project. He had the opportunity to work directly with scientists once a week at a Science Institute. I did not mind carpooling until he got his license, because I saw the great value in this connection between students and specialists working in the real world. Local businesses and medical facilities could provide students with hands-on training and internships and the professionals there could act as mentors. On a Middle School level, my school had a Health Careers Program that gave our students a wonderful opportunity to do community service while learning along with medical and support staff in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and senior centers.

We should be taking this same approach with our gifted students. We can easily accomplish this with the plethora of great web tools and our ability to connect with Skype, etc. Distance learning has to be revived with the latest tech tools. We should also be making better associations with higher education institutions. Provisions can be established for gifted high school students to earn college credits with colleges. We have to do more to join our students with experts outside the traditional classroom walls. I can envision Elluminate sessions with experts in a wide range of fields addressing and answering questions from students. This should be standard procedure in classes. It would also be nice to have students shadow professionals in different fields We also have to examine how individual students learn best. Some need structured learning environments where others need less structured learning experiences.

All preservice, graduate and leadership education programs should include specialized training for teaching and mentoring gifted learners. Emphasis should be focused on differentiated education of gifted learners

Teachers must also reach out to local museums. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example, has the Wachovia Education Resources Center that helps teachers use art and art images to enhance lessons in core curricular areas. The Exploratorium in San Francisco provides tools to make your work easier and more enriching, including things to do at the museum, hands-on activities, and a wealth of Web features about important science topics. Each year more than 10,000 educators take advantage of The Field Museum’s resources for professional development.

Reflecting on my own education I felt that the best classes I had on the undergraduate and graduate levels were ones that were taught by people who actually worked in that field or were called in as experts.

I feel that there has to be a strong commitment to gifted programs, the ongoing training of gifted teachers as well as all school staff members, and follow-up research on children who have gone through these programs. Counseling and guidance services must be provided on a continuous basis for gifted students.

More support services not only for the children but their parents to help them deal with their children are also needed. Every school district should have a gifted education school committee.

Much should be done to improve the delivery of education for our gifted students to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

[Please check out Jerry’s Gifted and Talented page: http://cybraryman.com/gifted.html]

One of the things that has drawn me to the particular collection of educators whom I follow on Twitter is that they have a passion for helping students learn better. Over the last couple of years, I have heard and participated in a lot of conversations about so-called “21st century” learning, education, teaching, etc. There seem to be a lot of assumptions about what this means.

We have the Parternship for 21st Century Skills, of course, but this seems to be only one dimension of what many talk about when they mention 21st century education.

I’ve been having a hard time wrapping my head around it, so to get some help from my colleagues and compile all of the various thoughts and ideas about the concept into one place, I’ve put together a Google document called “Compare & Contrast 20th/21st Century Education”. OK, not a spectacular title, I admit. But I thought that if we could generate a list of how modern education can, should, or does differ from the “old way” of doing things, maybe that would help me get a better handle on it. And if it helps some other people in the process, so much the better.

To take it to another level, Kim Printz (@paperwerksart on Twitter) asked me this tonight:

So I’ve added a section at the bottom of the document to share ideas about what to do with this list. Where should it go? How can we use it to impact schools and students? Come join both parts of the conversation, and add your thoughts to the list. Then take the list and share it with someone: a colleague, a parent, a principal. In the end, what matters most is not how we define 21st century education, but how we apply it to help students learn.

The Cabs of Times Square, by joiseyshowaa

I had a wide-ranging conversation over coffee the other day with David Timony (@drtimony on Twitter). One of the things that came up was the idea of students as consumers. David is doing research about what constitutes an expert teacher, focusing on teacher behaviors that influence student perceptions of expertise. It got me thinking about how we treat teachers and students in the big picture and the business of education today.

For a long time, educators have been told we need to run schools more like businesses, that the students are the consumers, and we need to let the market drive our methods. We should measure student performance and student reaction like corporations measure consumer preference and adjust our methods to produce the outcomes (increased sales) that we are looking for.

I have a problem with this approach, though. It presumes that the students are passive recipients of the education we are producing. It also leads to a market where many of the producers (schools) resort to manipulative and deceptive tactics to increase the numbers. We only need to look at recent news on Wall Street to see that reliance on one metric to judge performance can not only cause problems but it can affect the entire economy. Is this really what we want for education?

What if we turn the model upside down? What if we think of the students not as consumers but as the producers?

In the marketplace, corporations have a lot of control over their product, their methods, their advertising, but they are ultimately dependent on the consumer to judge their products and make them successful. The consumers also provide a great deal of feedback to the companies about what works, what doesn’t, and how they can improve their products to make them more successful. In addition, corporations have to work within an existing environment that dictates much of what they must do to succeed: laws, tax structures, suppliers, competition, investors, and so on.

If students become the producers, they will have to work in the environment created by the schools and teachers, including curriculum, standards, and so on. The teachers become the consumers, providing feedback and guiding the learning process (roughly parallel to R&D in the corporate world).

This model is far from perfect, of course. There is a great deal about learning and about school that doesn’t fit into the business approach. But if we’re going to be asked, or even required, to do business like a business, then let’s really examine that model and think hard about what it means for kids.

Curriculum today is very full. We do our best to stuff every little thing that may have some importance or relevance to a subject into the 180 day school year, and since it won’t all fit, we assign the rest as homework. Any teacher who has been teaching for more than a year knows that there is no practical way to complete the entire prescribed curriculum in one year, even if you take the tour bus approach and just point out the highlights to the students as you cruise by at seventy miles and hour.

I’m no longer convinced that the purpose of curriculum is to assemble in one place all the important “stuff” that a kid should know by the end of the school year. There’s too much that’s important anyway, we won’t all agree on which things are truly important, and the volume increases almost daily.

So what if curriculum instead were designed with holes, with a certain amount of white space? In visual design, the white space does a few things: it brings attention to the other elements of the design, it allows them to breathe, and it helps make them dynamic. Taking out some stuff and leaving more space in the curriculum can do similar things for the student.

Invite. Curriculum should first be built so that the student wants to engage with the content. It should be active, it should be interesting, it should be personal. Make it real and relevant. Start with where the students are. Connect to their interests and their worlds.

Inspire. Next the curriculum should motivate students to want to learn about the subject. The word inspire originally meant “to breathe into” or “to infuse life by breathing”. There is very little breathing room in today’s curriculum. Kids have no time to breathe in and reflect on their learning. They just have to cram it in and move on.

Ignite. Finally, the curriculum must light the fire. Leave students at the end of the unit or school year feeling like there is so much more to explore and so much deeper to go. If we ignite their passions and their natural curiosity, they will continue to pursue it on their own.

I remember so many times “discovering” a subject as a teacher that I thought I had no interest in learning about, but when I really engaged it (because I had to teach it), I found it fascinating and went on to study it on my own. I think a well-designed curriculum can do that for students.

Understand that I don’t believe curriculum can do this alone. None of these things can or will happen without an excellent teacher. Curriculum doesn’t live until students and teachers interact and engage it. But a strong curriculum will give the teacher the tools and resources to accomplish these things more easily.

Accomplishing this is the real challenge, of course. How do we create a curriculum that does these things? How do we anticipate where kids are when there are so many different varied experiences around the world? Perhaps this is an argument for purely locally designed curricula, but I’m not sure that’s practical. What do you think? How can we make this happen? Or is it just a fantasy that will never become reality?

Gifted education has been around for over a century. Researchers have studied what it means to be gifted, and what are the best methods for educating the gifted. It has been an uphill journey for many reasons. A great number of people believe that there is no need to provide gifted education, that it is elitist and unfair, and that gifted kids will do fine anyway, so why waste energy and resources on special programs for them?

It is not my purpose today to engage in this debate. But I keep coming back to a comment that was made to me recently in connection with a project I’m doing at work. My district is in the midst of a comprehensive review and analysis of our gifted program. As part of that review, we have created a new vision and mission statement for the gifted program. (For the curious among you, it is posted here)

I shared the draft of that document with my administration, then unveiled it publicly for the first time at a school board meeting. In among the many positive and encouraging responses, a few people commented that, while the statements were nice, aren’t these things we should be doing with every student?

This echoes similar sentiments I’ve heard for as long as I’ve been teaching. Of course the answer is yes; though the emphasis for the general education curriculum and program will be on different kinds of things, the “stuff” that for so long was the core of gifted education has become part of the mainstream 21st century emphasis.

It got me thinking about what gifted education should look like in today’s schools. Is it still necessary in an age when high level thinking and problem solving, collaboration, technology, differentiation, and inclusion are growing in their importance and reach in our schools? I believe it is, but my thoughts are continuing to evolve about what it should do and how.

So what should gifted education be in the 21st century? I don’t know. Yet. But I’ve invited a collection of people who have had a tremendous influence on my learning and thinking to help me answer that question. Over the next several weeks, eleven people who I consider colleagues and friends will be guests on this blog, wrestling with that very question. I am looking forward to reading what they have to say. I hope you are too.

Posts in this series:

Empowering the Future, by Mary Beth Hertz
What Does It Mean to Be Gifted Now? by Tony Baldasero
The Future of Gifted Education, by Jerry Blumengarten
I Don’t Know, by Jeff Agamenoni
Gifted but Lacking?, by Kevin Washburn
What If Every Child Was Gifted?, by Brandi Jordan
Gifted Education in the 21st Century, by Damian Bariexca