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Bureaucracy Can Make Us Crazy!
A few months back I wrote my manifesto about National Testing, if you haven’t read the paper you can get it here. At the time of writing that paper I was focused on the impact that national tests have on students and how we might be measuring only a little bit of student ability or school quality. My highest priority wasn’t the impact on the staff. But today I read this article on the New York Times website about Joyce Irvine.
Joyce Irvine was the Principal at Wheeler Elementary School in Vermont. I don’t know Joyce Irvine, I hadn’t heard about Wheeler Elementary before I read about it in the NY times today and I don’t profess to be an expert on the school now. I use the example to illustrate my point about the need to measure more than IQ in standardized tests. We need to measure the EQ and SQ components as well if people insist on using large high stakes testing.
But Today I am deeply saddened for the entire Wheeler Elementary School community.
You see Ms Irvine was removed as Principal of Wheeler Elementary not because she was doing a poor job, not because the community had issues with her school management, not because the students at the school had poor relationships with her. In fact the district Superintendent gave her great performance reviews and praise.
She was removed because the school wanted a $3 million grant.
You see the US Federal Government has a few programs to help schools with additional funding fix their low test results. Schools where the national test results don’t meet the growth targets expected or the baselines predicted by some academic. Basically, grants to help schools that aren’t progressing on some performance scale that I don’t really understand or want to go into. The point is this – to qualify for this particular grant the school, or the district I guess, must impose some conditions on the school. This district choose to remove Ms Irvine as Principal and thus qualify for the grant.
You see Wheeler Elementary is a school that apparently has very low national or standardized tests results. But when you dig under the surface even just a little bit you find that apparently many of the Wheeler Elementary students are from refugee or special-ed backgrounds – the example sited in the article is 37 out of 39 5th graders. Surely this factor alone would make it harder for the school to meet some state or national benchmark.
So the question has to be asked – why was Ms Irvine removed?
The only answer I can come up with is – because $3 million of funding to improve the IQ domain test results of students was viewed as far more important than the detrimental impact on their EQ or SQ stability.
I personally am aware of another school that had their funding cut for the same reason and the student body was devastated. Most of the students were from different countries and couldn’t manage the language as well as the students born in the US. Most of the students were trying so hard to have the school keep their funding that when the funding fell through, they took it personally; after all, they had given their personal best to the endeavor!
I have to believe that someone somewhere in a remote office in a far away place is receiving feedback about their grant qualification process. I also need to believe that someone in the office next door is assessing the results on a lot of standardized tests of students from international backgrounds and briefing a Government official about the inherent unfairness built into the test analysis regime.
You see the problem is not in the actual test, but in the interpretation of the data and what the results actually mean.
Anyway back to Ms Joyce Irvine – I am deeply saddened for you and the community for which you worked with over the past 6 years. I am sorry that you personally have been caught up in the terrible regime of narrowly interpreting national and standardized tests results.
I have gone through life with this mantra in the front of my mind. Remember To Remember Who You Are
My thoughts go to Ms Joyce Irvine the Wheeler Elementary School community and to all the communities that may be negatively impacted by this process.
I hope that someday we can find a better way to balance the societal imbalances that lead to these kinds of outcomes.
We have, after all, sent men to the moon, expanded our research into the secrets of the human brain, found vaccines to stop horrific diseases and on we go in our expansion of knowledge. May we now bring wisdom to bear on the educational needs of a population that comes from varying backgrounds and different demographics. Every one of these students has something to offer if we can just open the way.
Education is more than about the tools
Many education departments around the globe are rolling out or considering the roll out of some form of one-to-one computer program. Some programs even have the students taking the laptop computer home.
So with these programs in mind I read with interest this article on the NY Times website – Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality. The article basically highlights a couple of US studies showing not an improvement in academic outcomes for students, but actually a decline in academic performance during the introduction of laptop computers to low socio-economic households.
So this got me thinking. Lots of questions not many answers yet!
Why do we expect that simply supplying new tools will improve students’ IQ?
Should we evaluate technology programs like these outside of the IQ domain?
Maybe the student outcome improvements are actually in the EQ and SQ domains. Maybe the improvement is around self-esteem and a sense of personal connection with teachers and support staff.
Maybe providing students who have very little, is more about allowing them to feel like their peers who already have the technology. Maybe its about removing a social stigma and helping them to experience their own self-worth, as opposed to leaping their IQ.
I can’t answer these questions, but I hope someone can, at some stage!
But what I do know is education is more than supplying the latest tools, the best resources and the nicest classroom. These things help, but they are not the complete picture. Education is about relationship and that must encompass the emotional and social literacy that I keep talking about.
If tools like computers allow students from families with little to feel like everyone else, then I say roll out the one-to-one laptop programs FAST! If that is not the case, let’s find out what is and work from there!
The Other End of Continuum
Last week I wrote this post about the fantastic possibilities of the Ipad. Then this morning I was sent this video by David Linke – Thanks!
As I mentioned yesterday many things are on a continuum. This continuum doesn’t have to be negative and positive, just that there is a difference. I certainly believe the in the possibilities that the Ipad brings, but as an author I am convinced of the place of the book!
A little bit of fun to end the week, enjoy.
Confidence: The Multi-Layered Definition
For a very long time I have advocated the need to teach emotional and social literacy to students. I have talked about having t0 fragment all human traits into small steps so they are understandable by students in our classrooms and are therefore teachable.
In a recent corporate leadership seminar this specific topic of scaffolding skills for learners was raised. As a group we talked about the need to support all managers in acquiring confidence in their skills and how this process is a never ending continuum. Confidence in your own skills ebbs and flows as time marches forward depending on the things impacting our lives and the experiences we have.
To explicitly illustrate this point to the group I drew upon my experiences from the K-12 classrooms I have taught over the years, let’s do that here together. I am creating working definitions of the word confidence here, not a dictionary definition.
In a Year 2 Classroom we might define Confidence like this: Confidence is a belief in yourself, in the skills that you have and the things that you can do. It is knowing that you can do things and not have people laugh at you, like painting a picture or doing a show-and-tell in the morning for the entire class. Having confidence in yourself doesn’t mean not being nervous or scared of doing things, it means understanding that everyone gets nervous and scared at times but they are still willing to do the task.
This working definition in the Year 2 classroom is less relevant to the Principal running the school, or the Head of a Department. These adults will need a much different definition and framework to get an understanding of Confidence. When defining Confidence for adults we can bring other traits into the definition and expect the adult mind to link the traits together creating a much deeper understanding of Confidence.
As a group we defined Confidence for adults as: A long slow and steady accumulation of experience, knowledge and insight leading to self-awareness, self-respect and appreciation of others. A confident person can then apply these traits to new situations and challenges in the knowledge that whilst unnerving at times that they have the skills to get the desired outcome or are able to respond to the achieved outcome in a positive manner.
This second definition applies to the adults but would completely overwhelm a seven year old in Year 2.
You might even have a different definition of confidence, that’s great. I am sure that your definition will be framed by the experiences, knowledge and insights you have developed across your career and your life to date. You might even see that definition change as time marches on and your experiences deepen and broaden.
My ultimate point is human values and characters are very complex. If ever you see students, or adults in your schools, exhibiting poor human traits remember that they need a series of small steps to allow them to understand the issues, at this point in time, in their context and in their world-view.
A Book Worth Your Time
Over the past few years I have been presenting a 3-Day Women in Leadership workshop for the Centre for Strategic Education (CSE). During the years of delivering the program I have come to meet some amazing female school leaders. Each group of women that I have worked with has reminded me of the great resource women are to all educational communities. Women bring such a unique and wonderful model of leadership to a school.
During my May 2010 Australian Tour I was able to collect the final version of a book produced by the CSE on Women in School Leadership. I had read early manuscripts of the book, but to actually have the final version was a true gift. The book compiles the stories of 12 inspirational female school leaders. It is a must read for all those who wish to move up and expand their leadership, not just women. Within the covers lies a template for leadership success shared by women who have walked the path themselves.
I recommend the book to you – Women in School Leadership: Journeys to Success
You can buy the book directly from the CSE via this link
This is a short video that introduces the book:
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