Gradebook rant #1 and #2

#1 - The first quarter ("cycle") in CPS closed last night (Friday, 11/6) at midnight. But then CPS goes and locks the online software teachers need to use, so no more first quarter grades can be entered now.

I don't get this. If the quarter ends on Nov. 6 (Friday), the next one can't start until Nov. 9 (Monday). And report card pickup this year isn't until 11/18 or 19 depending (due I think to the late school year start because of the late Labor Day this year, and Nov. 11 Veteran's Day getting in the way). So why lock Gradebook at the cycle end and prevent teachers getting last minute grades in? Not that I want to spend the weekend getting final quarter grades in, but I'd rather do it clear-headed on a Saturday than late Friday night. Why not lock it Sunday midnight?

There is an implicit understanding that teachers cannot complete their work within the standard 6.25 hour CPS workday (hence closing Gradebook at midnight and not the end of the workday). The Professional Development Day (yesterday, Nov. 6) as a day to get grades in is a joke, because it gets loaded up with, well, PD. So what is CPS thinking? Most of the teachers at my school were assuming they had some time to get the quarter grades in, and only heard Friday (yesterday) morning that the deadline was midnight last night. I'm guessing more than 3/4 of teachers will need to have their Gradebooks unlocked by the school's Gradebook administrator or heaven forbid, someone in the technology support area.

It is another example of trying to force (what looks to me to be) silly and not-thought out dictates and demands on the troops-in-the-trenches (and believe me, it is WWI out here), which ends up making more work for everybody all the way round.

I guess the good news is that the time I was going to spend today fixing up the grades is freed up now.

#2 - I attended the CPS Information Technology Services (ITS) "TechTalk 2009" event last Tuesday at the UIC Forum. TechTalk is an opportunity for the technology apparatus at CPS to talk to the "techcos" (a conflation of "technology coordinator") from the 600 CPS public schools. [Aside -- the techco position is a role, not a position. Typically a teacher or some other staff member is assigned the role of "techco", not hired as such. Techcos form a critical rubber-hits-the-road role in the chain of CPS technology service delivery, but they are stretched between multiple responsibilities. I tire myself thinking about this.] Anyway, at TechTalk 2009, attendees were treated to a talk about Gradebook, which is CPS's branding of a commercial third-party product called Gradespeed.

The presenter gave one of those classic tech talks where the end users were morons who did not read instructions. In fact users are generally smart people confronted with a confusing interface that could easily be fixed up. It is a poor technologist who blames the user for design shortcomings. Case in point: teachers can enter a numeric code to represent comments like "Is too easily distracted" (but only one for elementary schools we learned, even though there are five boxes!) . If the code is "028", you need to enter the leading zero. Why? Lazy programming. The person I was sitting next to and I agreed that this could be fixed in a couple of lines of code and eliminate untold headaches on the part of teachers who enter "28" instead of "028". Thinking about it, it isn't a couple lines of code -- it is less, just a matter of wrapping the user input in a couple of functions that check the input and clean it up for the user -- maybe 20 extra characters of code.


Example #2: The user has a row of links at the top of the screen to control options:

This is an online application, so you might think that you can click on the image, that it is a button? Nope. Only the text is a link. I have worked with computers for over 25 years and this one tripped me up. One gets in the habit of thinking how things should work, primarily a habit of life experience. Software designers design an experience, and the best ones anticipate user expectations. The user should be at the center of the design, not the designer. That's what "participatory design" and incorporating real live users in the design process is all about. Put them in a room and see what they try to do before releasing the product.

Another example is that when entering assignments, you must click an "Add" button to add a new assignment. However, after clicking "Add", you see a blank form again. No program feedback is provided to indicate that the assignment was saved. Was it saved? How would you know? Only by exiting the "Add" function by clicking "Finish" (what are you finishing?), and seeing if it now appears in the assignment list. Again, some simple code to acknowledge that the "Add" operation was successful would be a trivial enhancement.

The computer experience is often akin to stumbling around with a bucket on your head -- you have precious little feedback on where you have been or where you are or what lies ahead. The best software designers provide lots of feedback: cookie trails with trackback links, alerts, the use of color in logical places, and so on. Not so with Gradespeed / Gradebook. Instead the poor user who only wants to accomplish a task and not "work a computer" is blamed for not understanding the software.

Too much ranting? It's a beautiful day today. And now no grades to enter. Yay I think.

jd

Charter school limit raised

I was reading through the Chicago Teachers Union newspaper (why do they print a four-color paper on clay-coated stock, especially given the financial problems the union is having?), and saw an article on Illinois Senate Bill 612, which was signed into law last July. Some highlights of the bill according to the article ("Charter school law includes wins and losses", p. 6):

• Doubles the cap on charter schools in the Chicago area from 30 to 60 single-campus schools, plus an allowance for up to five multi-campus charters targeting drop-outs.
• 75% of charter school teachers across the state will need to be certified, up from 50% in Chicago before.
• Charters need to disaggregate multi-campus data (single charters running multiple campuses was
  
• There can be 30 contract schools (bound by the Illinois School Code, but the CPS Board contracts out management of a school -- click here for more on the types of schools under Renaissance 2010), plus five additional contract "turnaround schools"; but the contracts go through a new authorization process.
• A parallel bill (SB 1984) says that charters fall under the Illinois Education Labor Relations Act, clarifying that teachers can organize at charters and contract schools.

The thing that sticks out the most to me is the doubling of the charter school number. In practice this will mean the closing of 30 more public schools because after students fill up the charters, the remaining public school enrollment will not justify keeping the school that lost students open.

In other CTU news, Jay Rehak and Lois Ashford won trustee seats on the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund in Friday's (10/30) election, defeating the incumbents supported by the CTU Executive Board. Rehak and Ashford are members of the Caucus of Rank and Educators (CORE). Per their web site, "We hope to democratize the Chicago Teacher’s Union and turn it into an organization that fights on behalf of its members and the students we teach."

This sounds like a rebuke of the current union leadership. What is the CTU doing anyway? And why does the CTU president draw two six-figure salaries? How can she do both jobs effectively? Which means she is doing neither one effectively. The new charter school bill, the school closings, Huberman's rampage, etc. etc. as cases in point...

jd

Creativity and education

What is education for? This is a the question explored in Daniel Wolff's new book, How Lincoln Learned to Read. I confess I haven't read the book yet, but I did hear him speak at a book signing last week, and it is in the queue. This question -- what do we want out of education, for ourselves, for our children, for our community ? -- seems to fall into two broad camps. One camp (and where I hang out, or try to) sees education as a self-maximization process, the be-all-you-can-be approach. Economics is secondary, and will follow in one way of another -- more of a statement of faith I suppose, but...

You can identify people from the other camp because the words "economic competitiveness" will likely pop up early on. Education is an economic function, in Marxist terms, the social reproduction of labor power. To be economically competitive in the global market, you need to know (fill in the blank). Pablum about the nature of work today, what employers look for or need to be competitive is trotted out, and then blueprints for "education reform" soon follow. Case in point: Thomas Friedman's October 20 column in the New York Times titled The New Untouchables. The "new untouchables" are the workers who bring something special (dare I say, something human?) to the workplace, like creativity or interpersonal skills, and thus are untouchable (i.e. difficult to replace) in the workplace. This has been a common theme over the past 25 years at least -- jobs that can be done by a machine or by a cheaper counterpart elsewhere will eventually be done by a machine or moved elsewhere. Within the dismal terms of the global economy, Capital will seek out the greatest return with the lowest cost, and Labor will always be an important front in the war to maximize profit. What is difficult to replicate in technology are attributes like (per Friedman) entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

The two camps do overlap in some areas. Friedman holds that creativity is a key feature of the successful modern worker; a humanist educator would agree that creativity is a very special human potential and should be nurtured. "Entrepreneurship" is a narrow economic term and situates education in terms of the marketplace; a broader conception is to foster initiative, forward thinking, exploration, fascination and a willingness to try things out. Nevertheless, there are common elements in both camps.

The sad irony in this is that both camps are calling for a radically different kind of education than that being forced down the throats of teachers in Chicago and elsewhere. Data-driven instruction may sound scientific and efficient, but at the heart of it, it is antithetical to the kinds of skills Friedman is writing about that today's economy needs. (And Friedman has narrowly of the conceived human being as only a worker -- it doesn't begin to touch on the full range of human possibility.)

Simply put, multiple choice is antithetical to creative thinking. In terms of either globalization (Friedman) or humanism, the approach is wrong and destructive. Our society and planet face big big problems, and time is to critical to be wasted screwing around with wrong solutions.

jd

Huberman's vision for education in Chicago

I heard the Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Office Ron Huberman speak on September 29 to a group of principals and teachers where he once again laid out his agenda for Chicago public schools.

Huberman's plan is organized around themes of "performance management" and "data driven instruction." Like other Mayor Daley appointees, Huberman (who, for the sake of possible non-Chicago readers, came to the school system from the Chicago Transit Authority) in theory brings private-sector style managerial expertise to the sprawling bureaucracy of CPS. George Schmidt, in his front page story ("Data Driven Drivel", sprawling in its own way) in the latest issue of Substance, uses the term "narrative" to describe Huberman's pitch. The term is well chosen I think. "Narrative" captures the essential point that Huberman is telling a story about what is happening. In this case he is framing it within the too familiar story of capitalism and the market, with all of the narrow and limiting assumptions and possibilities that that dismal story allows: In his narrative-story-vision, schools are education finishing plants that add education "value" to children. Value-added is measured by the change in standardized test scores over time. Individual schools are the education providers (not the school system, which only provides infrastructure), and schools, in the Obama-Duncan-Huberman world of "choice" (another marketplace term), compete with each other for raw material to finish. In this story, parents are free to take their raw material to whichever finishing plant is going to add the most value.

Hubeman is very explicit about this. In his September talk, he described each child as having a "backpack" of money, the money collected from taxpayers to educate children. CPS collects about $10,000 per child per year, or $14,000 for Title I schools (schools with large numbers of students from poor families that receive additional Federal money). In Huberman's vision, parents should be able to take that backpack of cash to the school of their choice. Schools will have consumer report cards showing their "value-added" scores to help parents in choosing the schools most successful at raising test scores. Teachers at each school will compete with the teachers at other schools in the city, both public and charter, and through that marketplace competition, their schools, at least in theory, will become better finishing plants.

So what is wrong with Huberman's story? I think that in practice, schools doing well now will catch the best students, and struggling schools will fall further behind. It is the same process of polarization that plays out in the economy at large -- the rich get richer, etc. Likewise, charters skim off the best students, or the students with the most parent involvement in their lives (and there is some correlation there). Public neighborhood schools become the schools of last resort -- they cannot refuse to take a student in their attendance boundaries. The students with the most needs will pool up in the public schools. Their test scores will sink the neighborhood schools, feeding a vicious cycle of increasing privatization. More charters will spring up to snatch the backpack of cash; the teacher's union will be effectively broken; and the concept of public education as a great project of Democracy will die.

Management by FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt -- is the order of the day in many CPS schools now as the pace of this process accelerates. It is questionable that that strategy works in private companies; in a school it is disastrous. Teachers feel like they are under siege. They have a difficult-enough time as it is, coping with classes with too many students, with too few resources, no recess, and a steady stream of new mandates from on high. The axe of school closing and unemployment, based on one testing event a year, now swings over their heads as well.

The marketplace model has other problems too. Certainly accountability is important, but it needs to recognize that schools are not separate from social and historic forces playing out outside of the school building. But reducing accountability to test scores is fundamentally flawed. Test scores are a convenient metric, and fit in with the overall quantification of everything that is part and parcel of the marketplace metaphysic. More on that in my next post.

jd

CPS moves to online assessments

I attended a briefing for principals and test coordinators on the CPS district-wide assessment plan for the coming year. The briefing was given folks from the Department of Student Assessment, a part of the Office of Research, Evaluation and Accountability. Click here for a link to the Powerpoint presentation for elementary schools. The DoSA page also has a link to the high school strategy presentation.

I was primarily interested in Grades 3 - 8, so this summary only touches on that. CPS will administer three benchmarks assessments in reading and math this year, in October, January and May. (Here's a link for the complete assessment schedule.) The district is moving towards an online benchmark assessment, and is supposed to be working to get all schools ready to move to all-online benchmark assessments in 2010-11. Some schools (if they have the technology infrastructure) will be able to start with online assessment beginning with the winter assessment in January. (Constructed response questions will still be graded by hand, by teachers, and entered manually into CIM.)

Setting aside the tremendous limitations of multiple choice as an assessment tool (and how education, like so many things today, is inverted to serve the available technology, and not the other way round, but that's another discussion) ...

The advantage to online assessment is that multiple choice results are available immediately, instead of two to three weeks later. The disadvantages: getting the students used to the testing format and software (sigh, that this should be an issue -- we train them to be multiple-choice test-takers), scheduling test time in the computer lab, the inevitable network and software and computer problems, the extra burden on technology staff, handling accommodations in a computer lab setting, and no doubt other issues not immediately popping into my brain.

CPS is also moving to a second testing format, the Scantron Performance Series, which is a computer-based adaptive testing tool. "Adaptive" means that the testing software presents the test-taker with more difficult questions if he or she answered the previous question correctly; or an easier question if the previous question was answered incorrectly, until the testing algorithm can determine a performance level for the test taker. Students will take reading, math and science Scantron tests.

In 2009-10, Scantron is available as either an addition to the district benchmark assessment, or as a substitute. In 2010-11, students will take both tests, three times a year. This flows from the new Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman's emphasis on data collection as an education management tool. See Catalyst's 9/3/09 posting "Huberman outlines strategies to improve Chicago schools" for a brief overview.

The Benchmark Assessment is a criterion-referenced assessment, and so is intended to measure student mastery of particular skills (the criteria). [The math assessment question mix is also mapped to the Chicago Math and Science Initiative (CMSI) pacing guide for the four chosen CMSI math curricula (Trailblazers, Everyday Math, Connected Math and MathThematics).] As a performance measurement tool, the Benchmark Assessment is not so useful. The best proxy in the BA data for tracking overall performance has been the ISAT Predicted Scale Score, a guesstimate of how the student will perform on the state standardized test. The predicted score is supposedly anywhere from about 75% to 90% accurate (I just got our schools numbers so haven't seen yet how this relates to our results.)

The Scantron test is a performance measurement -- it doesn't say specifically what a student knows or needs to work on (which isn't to say necessarily that the Benchmark Assessment does, although that is its purpose), only where a student is in the mass of students, and is he or she making "progress" based on prior Scantron scores. The Benchmark Assessment is considered "low stakes" (no one's job is on the line, schools won't be closed because of scores, students won't be held back -- as opposed to "high stakes" like ISAT where all three of the above are the case).

I suspect that the Scantron test will come to be considered by school administrators and teachers as high stakes. I am guessing that the Scantron numbers will be the bottom line numbers to determine if students are "progressing", and therefore used by top-level administration to lean on principals and teachers.

jd

P.S. Writing assessments are built into the Reading Benchmark (3x a year, scored by teachers) plus one additional district-wide assessment, scored externally, that will be used for promotion determination. K-2 students will use one of three early literacy assessment tools (including DIBELS).

Links on play + link on distraction

Here are a few links on the importance of play in learning, especially for younger children. The first is an op-ed piece from the New York Times about baby smarts, Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think.

And then some follow-up comments.

And there's this related 2008 NPR story, Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills by Alix Spiegel (thanks Roberta!)

Finally, apropos my earlier post related to attention / distraction, there's this link from Russ Revzan's "Thoughts of Russ" blog:

Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows

(Russ works with CUIP, the Chicago Public Schools - University of Chicago Internet Project, advising schools on how to make the most of their new technologies).

jd

Beyond textbooks

Some links from today's (8/9/09) New York Times:

In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History

Beyond Textbooks

CK-12 Foundation: "CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the 'FlexBook,' CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning."

Huh.

jd