The Education Gadfly Weekly

If you’re an aficionado of the Education Gadfly, there’s a fair chance you’ve read or heard me discussing my new book, The Cage-Busting Teacher.  It’s written wholly for educators and fueled by interviews and discussions with hundreds of teacher-leaders. In it, I observe that even terrific teachers routinely say they feel stymied, offer insights on how teachers can create the schools and systems where they can do their best work, and explain where practitioners tend to stumble on this count.

But what about policymakers and reformers? What does The Cage-Busting Teacher mean for them? How can they create the conditions whereby cage-busting teachers can thrive? Let me offer four suggestions.

First, policymakers and reformers need to keep in mind that they’re not the ones who educate kids. Heck, they’re only occasionally in classrooms—and they’re not the ones held accountable for how students are faring. From the teacher’s perspective, they—we—are backseat drivers. Everybody gets frustrated by backseat drivers, even when they have good advice to offer. Passengers can carefully study the GPS or old-fashioned roadmap while the driver focuses on the road. They can see signs that the driver missed, maybe even the truck out front making an unexpectedly fast stop.  But backseat drivers need to remember all the stuff they’re not dealing with...because they’re not actually driving. It’s one thing to offer alternate routes or constructive feedback; it’s another to ding the driver for being lazy or irresponsible from the comfort of the backseat. Yet that’s how the rhetoric of reformers and the proposals of policymakers often strike educators. Some of that’s inevitable, even when reformers are speaking carefully and offering well-crafted policies. But condemnations of “failing” schools and proposals for teacher evaluation often feel untethered to any awareness that they’re being proffered from the back seat. 

Second, policymakers and reformers should understand that the role of schools is seen differently by experienced practitioners.  For “reformers,” results are what matter most about schools. Schools are routinely labeled “good” if their reading and math scores and growth rates are robust. Period. Any effort to qualify that or emphasize other metrics gets dismissed as “excuse-making.” Well, schools are real places where educators work with individual kids. They see and gauge their work accordingly. Like other professionals, most educators strive to do a good job. They take pride in their work. They’re attuned to the challenges that kids can face, the easy-to-overlook value of a choral group or an arts project, and when the practical impact of policies seems arbitrary or unfair. Policy types and practitioners see the education world through different lenses—opposite ends of the telescope, actually—and that’s mostly healthy. Policy types don’t need to ignore their concerns and defer to the practitioner perspective, but they need to respect it and show that they get it. Instead, far too often, they seem to casually belittle it.  (For their part, teachers should keep in mind that the policy folks may have pretty good ideas for the “system” as a whole, even if they’re remote from day-to-day classroom realities in real schools.)

Third, policymakers and reformers need to become better listeners.  In my book, I push back hard against those educators who wish policymakers “would just get out of schooling” and “leave it to the educators.” I tell them that they’re being paid with public funds to serve the public’s kids, and therefore it’s inevitable (and appropriate) that public officials will have a lot to say about how schools work and how they’re held accountable. That’s what it means to be a public servant. But the reciprocal obligation on policymakers and reformers is to listen carefully and acknowledge that educators are the ones in the schools every day. They’re the ones who do the work and see how new teacher evaluation systems, state tests, or interventions are playing out. Their insights on all of this should be solicited and valued. This requires more than talking to the leaders of teacher advocacy groups who are in our email address books and who show up at familiar conferences. It means making an effort to hear from a cross-section of practitioners. And it means listening to what they have to say; their concerns can’t be routinely dismissed as bellyaching or “adult interests.” I’m a pretty jaded guy but, in talking to hundreds of folks for The Cage-Busting Teacher, even I was surprised by the number of accomplished teachers who admitted to being hesitant to speak up because of scars they carried from when they had previously done so.

Finally, listening to educators doesn’t mean pandering to them. We have an unfortunate habit of talking to educators like we do to Cub Scouts: They’re awesome. They’re heroic and great and we’re grateful for their existence; now won’t they please go play quietly in the corner while we deal with the serious stuff. Both parts of that are wrong. Policy types can and should say that some teachers are terrific...and that some aren’t. (It’d also be a nice step if reformers did more to acknowledge that the same holds true within their own ranks.) The key is to treat teachers as adults who are able—and who deserve—to hear both the good and the bad. This is how we talk to professionals we respect. Of course, as I frequently tell teachers, it’s then on them to respond in kind. 

We’ve been caught in a destructive cycle for years now, fueled by intermittent but mutual distrust between policymakers and practitioners. That dynamic has fueled increasingly aggressive policies, which has spurred teacher backlash, and on and on. Reversing that cycle requires educators to do their part. But they can’t do it alone. Their efforts will only matter if reformers and policymakers do theirs too.

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Cage-Busting Teacher. 

Note: On Tuesday, April 28, from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. ET, the Fordham Institute will host a discussion with Greg Toppo on his new book, The Game Believes in You, from which this essay is adapted. See our event page for more information and to register. All are invited to stay for a small reception following the event.

After decades of ambivalence, suspicion, and sometimes outright hostility, educators are beginning to discover the charms of digital games and simulations, in the process rewriting centuries-old rules of learning, motivation, and success.

Teachers have long used cards, dice, pencil-and-paper games, and board games to teach and reinforce key concepts. But digital technology, and games in particular, go even further. Because games look so little like school, they force us to reconsider our most basic assumptions about how children learn: What is school for and what should students do there? Where should kids get their content and how? How important is it that they like what they’re doing? What is our tolerance for failure and what is our standard for success? Who is in control here?

Even the electronic versions of games have a history dating back two generations. The eighth graders who shot buffalo in the first rudimentary version of The Oregon Trail—on a teletype in a Minneapolis classroom in 1971—are now old enough to be grandparents. The movement’s de facto vision statement emerged exactly twenty-five years ago, when an eight-year-old boy in an after-school program at MIT’s Media Lab was showing off a bit of handiwork he’d created with LEGOs and a rudimentary computer program. Asked about the usefulness of the project, he told a skeptical TV reporter, “Yes, this is fun, but it’s hard fun.”

Games focus, inspire, and reassure young people in ways that school often can’t. If you are a young person, games like Minecraft and Clash of Clans give you a chance to learn at your own pace, take risks, and cultivate deeper understanding. While teachers, parents, and friends may encourage and support you, these natural resources are limited. Computers work on a completely different scale and timetable. Your teacher may be overwhelmed, your friends wish you’d finish your homework, and your mom just wants to go to bed. But a well-designed game sits and waits…and waits. It doesn’t care if that wearisome math problem takes you fifteen seconds or four hours. Do it again. Take all day. The game believes in you.

Increasingly, it also knows you, or at least your abilities, better than anyone. At the exact time that states have raised the stakes on annual standardized tests, games have demonstrated the power of embedded, invisible, continuous assessment.

The implications for school are, in a way, staggering. Imagine if every morning, in every school, every child showed up and worked as hard as he or she could. Students would eagerly accept challenges that they knew were not only suited to their abilities but beyond them, trying repeatedly in the face of failure after failure. They would be so engaged that at the sound of the final bell, they’d look up and wonder where the day had gone. What if schools, from the wealthiest suburban nursery school to the grittiest urban high school, thrummed with the sounds of deep immersion? That may sound a bit idealistic, but this is how educators in this field routinely talk about their work. They even have a name for the thing that happens when students are immersed in work that is perfectly suited to their abilities: flow.

We don’t know what’s happening in kids’ heads when they’re playing games. Actually, we think we know what’s happening, and we don’t like it. A peek beneath the hood shows that what’s going on is often exactly the opposite of what it looks like. What looks like escapist fun is really deep concentration. What looks like instant gratification is really delayed gratification in clever disguise. What looks like spectacle is really a system that is training players to ignore the spectacle and focus on the real work at hand. What looks like anything-goes freedom is really submission to strict rules. What looks like a twenty-first-century, flashy, high-tech way to keep kids entertained is really a tool that taps into an ancient way to process, explore, and understand the world.

Unlike many previous education movements, this one seems to defy easy labels. It is neither conservative nor liberal, neither wholly traditional nor wholly experimental. Games have a little something for everyone. For the crunchy and student-centered, they scratch an essential itch, sucking kids into a deep stream of engagement and teaching them to think, negotiate, imagine, and solve problems. Games give children autonomy and agency, helping them design their own solutions, collaborate with friends, and create natural “affinity groups” that bring learning alive outside the classroom. For the skills-and-assessment type, games frontload massive amounts of content, offer focused and efficient drills and practice, build on prior knowledge, strengthen grit, and, at the end of the day, deliver a personalized performance data stream that would make the most hardassed psychometrician smile.

Kids make mud pies and paper airplanes; they climb trees and play the piano. The entire time, they’re exploring and learning about the world. As neurologist Frank Wilson said, “A hand is always in search of a brain and a brain is in search of a hand.” We celebrate play and even fight for children’s right to do more of it when they’re in school. Yet we’re quick to jettison play when we feel it’s not up to the serious task of moving large amounts of material into our children’s minds, especially when they’re older. Let’s rethink that belief. Let’s consider a broader application of play in children’s lives, one that holds out the possibility that more play and playful thinking could, ironically, make our schools more serious, productive places.

As astrophysicist Jodi Asbell-Clarke, who leads a team developing science and math games, once told me, “We’re not trying to turn your students into gamers. We’re trying to turn your gamers into students.”

Tell me if you disagree, my fellow wonks and pundits, but I don’t think anyone predicted a 22-0 vote from the Senate HELP committee on ESEA reauthorization. What an amazing tribute to the bipartisan leadership of Chairman Lamar Alexander and ranking member Patty Murray.

So what happens now? The next stop is the Senate floor, where members of the committee and others will introduce many an amendment—some of which will be plenty controversial, but few of which will muster sixty votes. At that point, we’ll learn whether there are sixty votes to pass the bill as a whole. The unanimous committee vote certainly bodes well, though it’s no guarantee. (I can’t imagine Senator Rand Paul voting for a bill on the Senate floor that doesn’t including Title I portability, for example, but there aren’t the numbers for that. So he’ll vote nay.)

And if the Senate does pass a bill? Then there’s that pesky House of Representatives. That’s where things get interesting. House Republican leaders will face three choices:

First, they can take the Senate bill straight to the House floor and seek to pass it with bipartisan support. They will almost surely lose many liberals and conservatives, but they might squeak out a majority consisting of both Republicans and Democrats. (If they can’t get a majority of Republicans, they will have to break the “Hastert Rule” to pass it, which seems unlikely.)

Second, they can rally their fellow Republicans to pass Education Committee Chairman John Kline’s bill on a party-line vote and then take that to conference.

Third, they can do nothing and allow the Senate bill to die, thus almost certainly dooming ESEA reauthorization until well after the 2016 election.

Option one would be most straightforward, as well as the quickest, surest route to a bill that President Obama would sign. But it would mean embracing a fairly moderate bill (though still one far friendlier to Republican principles of federalism than current law).

Option two is the best way for Republicans to nudge the Senate bill to the right—giving conservatives some leverage in a conference committee. This is the option I prefer. But it carries the risk of a deadlocked conference, a product that the Senate could not (by sixty votes) approve, and/or one that would never make it through the Oval Office.

Option three is the worst, since we desperately need a new ESEA. Yet I can imagine the Pickett’s Charge wing of the GOP (and their do-or-die allies at Heritage Action) demanding it, since neither option one nor option two will result in the complete abdication of the federal role in education. (Of course, neither will sticking with current statute, which is the practical effect of pursuing option three.) Speaker John Boehner will have to decide whether to cross them on this.

That’s how I see it. Then again, I didn’t see a unanimous committee vote coming, so tell me if I’ve got this one wrong, too.

• A few weeks ago, the Gadfly highlighted the work of the New York Times, which ran a long and deeply reported (some would say tendentious) examination of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter network. The piece vividly detailed the disputes circulating around the schools and led Moskowitz to issue an impassioned response to her employees. More recently, the paper has published testimonials from parents of Success Academy pupils, including both those distraught by the organization’s strict behavioral controls and those elated with their children’s improved grades and newfound zest for learning. The experiences they depict should already be familiar to those who have followed the story—Peerless school culture! Crushing academic expectations! Scary-good test scores! Just-plain-scary disciplinary practices!—but it’s worth celebrating the fact that these parents can choose to either stick with the program or look for a better fit for their kids. The first two lines of one account, from a Manhattan father, are particularly cheering: “I grew up poor, and my parents never had a choice in where to send me to school. So my wife, Mariann, and I knew we wanted to find the very best option for our son Luke.”
• Those words should be put on a plaque and mounted in the office of every state legislator in the country. Parental choice in education is a top priority for reformers everywhere, and the statehouse is the best place to protect and expand it. Thankfully, 2015 has been a fantastic year so far for school choice. In Alabama, Governor Robert Bentley signed into law a bill that legalized charter schools for the first time. Republicans in Nevada and Arkansas pushed through legislation that will open up private schools to impoverished and disabled students. And similar promising efforts are proceeding in Texas and Florida. School choice is on the march.

Hess’s The Cage-Busting Teacher, Toppo’s The Game Believes in You, Putnam’s Our Kids, and a leaky teacher pipeline.

Amber's Research Minute

In 2010, former teacher, principal, and charter-school founder Doug Lemov authored Teach Like a Champion. The book offered a whole new perspective on teacher training—one that has yet to be embraced by ed schools. Since its release, thousands of teachers have adopted its framework as their own, becoming better teachers for it. Now Doug Lemov is back with a new edition: Teach Like a Champion 2.0 offers specific, concrete, and actionable techniques for teachers. But what’s so special about these techniques? And where are ed schools falling short? What does it take to teach like a champion in today’s school system?

Watch this conversation with Doug Lemov on his new book and a panel discussion on what it takes to prepare our teachers to teach like champions.

After the expectations-busting success of Cage-Busting Leadership two years ago, it’s no surprise that Rick Hess, head of the American Enterprise Institute’s education policy shop, is back with a sequel. The Cage-Busting Teacher has an arguably tougher goal than its predecessor, as there are millions more teachers than district leaders, and thousands more bars in teachers’ cages. Hess’s advice provides a road map for ambitious teachers. But his acknowledgement of critical, systemic issues highlights the fact that teachers can’t—and shouldn’t—have to go at it alone.

The book uses real-life anecdotes, peppered with references to everything from Say Anything to Aaron Sorkin, to illustrate cage busting and urge educators to take an active role in reforming the system to work for them. It’s an eminently readable work with deeply practical advice. Chapters focus on “managing up” with overworked administrators; identifying problems and selling solutions; becoming a savvy networker with district, union, and political leadership; and explaining common trip wires, like budgets and the policy cycle, in plainspoken English. High-placed leaders from TFA to the AFT weigh in on how teachers can develop greater agency and autonomy within the profession. As a former teacher who struggled with finding both during my two years in the classroom—damage from an earthquake actually closed my school at one point, which is only the most dramatic illustration of how little control I felt I had—I can attest that there’s certainly a ready audience.

But in keeping with Hess’s use of pop culture, I have to mention a now-classic SNL skit: In it, Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin declares, “Anyone can be President…all you have to do is want it!” Amy Poehler, impersonating Hillary Clinton, laughs bitterly and replies, “Yes, if I could change one thing, I probably should have wanted it more.” At several points in the book, teachers and policymakers point out that “teacher leadership” frequently just means extra work in exchange for doing a good job. Cage busting frequently leads to extra work too, but based on the teacher’s initiative; in a few examples, the cage busters’ programs or initiatives failed due to bureaucracy anyway. Working around the cage doesn’t eliminate it, nor does urging teachers to use their “moral authority” to get people to their side. Eventually, the teacher bumps up against either a cage or a forced choice to leave the classroom—thus making the premise of a cage-busting teacher a bit of a paradox.

Hess acknowledges this forced choice and suggests that better policies, created by cage-busting teachers collaborating with other cage busters, may create a better environment. I hope that this happens, and that books like this can bring more teachers to the table. But we need those cage-busting superintendents (and those cage-busting policymakers, parents, and lawmakers) to make the system truly work for teachers—and ultimately for students.

SOURCE: Frederick M. Hess, The Cage-Busting Teacher (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2015).

Everyone knows that impenetrable jargon is to the education community what sputtering indignation is to Twitter: both irritating and contagious. When teachers and administrators hold forth on the importance of psychometrics and normed modality processing, it emboldens the rest of us to test our comfort with stackable credentials and mastery-based learning. And in the midst of this morass of deliberate obscurantism, a term like “career-ready” should seem like a godsend. But as this new brief from ACT, Inc. reminds us, there are important nuances to even the most outwardly simple concepts.

Nearly ten years ago, the organization released Ready for College and Ready for Work: Same or Different?, a similar publication that made the case for equivalently rigorous education for all high school graduates, regardless of whether they matriculate into colleges or head directly for the workplace. As the authors of Unpacking “Career Readiness” note, the earlier brief “described college and career readiness in terms of benchmarks focusing solely on academic assessments and the level of education…required for success in postsecondary education or targeted workforce training.” They concede, though, that subsequent research “has clearly established the value of additional areas of competency that are important for both college and career readiness and success.”

Those unexplored areas fall largely into the realm of what are now commonly called “non-cognitive” abilities—habits of mind and behavior like stress management, cooperation, critical thinking, and adaptability, which contribute greatly to success in the professional world. ACT divides these skills into four categories and (surprise, surprise) touts its array of tests as the ideal tools to assess them. None of this is groundbreaking, surely, but it’s good to see one of the country’s leading testmakers diversifying its conception of aptitude.

Even more useful is the brief’s breakdown of the rather airy concept of career readiness into three increasingly specific categories: “work readiness,” a kind of foundational standard indicating general preparation for post-graduation job training; “career readiness,” which narrows the focus on different career clusters (e.g., health care, manufacturing, information technology) and the knowledge that must accompany them; and finally “job readiness,” referring to academic skills that are additionally refined for individual occupations. The terminology will hopefully give us a more detailed picture of what graduates are equipped to take on after the K–12 years. No, it may not be as much fun as talking about morphosyntactic skills. But it could actually, you know, make sense.

SOURCE: “Unpacking ‘Career Readiness’,” ACT, Inc. (April 2015).

The University of Kentucky may have lost the NCAA tournament, but Kentuckians can still take heart in their K–12 schools’ promising non-athletic gains. According to this new report, the Bluegrass State’s ACT scores have shot up since it began to implement the Common Core in 2011–12.

Using data from the Kentucky Department of Education, the study compared ACT scores for three cohorts of students who entered eighth grade between the 2007–08 and 2009–10 school years. The first group took the ACT—a state requirement for all eleventh graders—in 2010–11, immediately prior to CCSS implementation. They were therefore not formally exposed to instruction under the new standards. Cohorts two and three took the ACT in 2011–11 and 2012–13, after the introduction of CCSS-aligned curricula. They earned composite scores that were 0.18 and 0.25 points higher, respectively, relative to first cohort. The study authors report this gain as roughly equivalent to three months of additional learning.

The report rightly cautions against reading too much into these early findings. The short interval between Common Core implementation and the cohorts’ ACT scores reduces the effect the standards could have on student achievement. The authors also note that it is not clear whether the scoring gains could have been attributed to other systemic changes, such as new testing, accountability, and teacher evaluation models that were introduced concurrently with Common Core. Nevertheless, considering that Kentucky’s former state standards for math and English language arts both received a D rating in our State of State Standards report, the improving ACT results from Kentucky may be a sign of better things to come for more states across the nation.

SOURCE: Zeyu Xu and Kennan Cepa, “Getting College and Career Ready During State Transition Toward the Common Core State Standards,” American Institutes for Research (April 2015).