Have You Heard? - The Remix

Board of Education president Robin Kulwin, in recent postings online and in the Montclair Times, and Superintendent Dr. Penny MacCormack, in her recently inaugurated “Straight from the Superintendent” and “Have You Heard?” communiqués, have made some potentially misleading statements. Here are some clarifications – my own “Have You Heard?” if you will.

Have you heard the district is not “corporatizing” education because Dr. MacCormack is a career educator and not an executive?

Ms. Kulwin knows full well (or at least should) that when education activists speak of “corporate education reform” we don’t just mean actual influence of corporations. We also refer to the corporate management style and corporate jargon (e.g. Chief _____ Officer) that accompany education “reform,” which itself is a set of technocratic policies that seek to shape education in ways corporate elites advocate. Increased efforts to quantify educational processes, narrow and socially reproductive epistemologies, growing homogenization of curriculum and instruction, test-and-punish regimes and “turnaround” initiatives, deceptively apolitical “college and career readiness” rhetoric, a crisis paradigm linked to competitive globalized capitalism – these are all hallmarks of the corporatization of education (many of them developed without solid evidence or despite such solid evidence to the contrary), whether or not the leader implementing them has spent one minute in a boardroom. Aside from what is generated at the national and state levels (Common Core, merit pay schemes, weakening tenure), we can argue about how much of this corporate reform has infected Montclair (and I’d say a good deal has or is about to), but let’s not pretend it ceases to be corporatizing just because Dr. MacCormack hasn’t worked in business.

By now I think most people are familiar with the role of the Broad Foundation and its “academy,” which spawned our superintendent, in this corporate reform movement. Therefore, I will not elaborate on that here.

Have you heard that the new curricula developed over the summer were teacher-produced?

To be sure, rank-and-file classroom teachers did the requisite labor in this summer’s curriculum writing. However, while the end products were teacher-produced, the process was far from teacher-driven. It was marked by incomplete and conflicting information from the beginning. Once the writing was underway, there were numerous examples of Central Office staff rejecting specific portions of the teachers’ products. For example, at the beginning of the process, teachers were told that they could use performance-based and portfolio-based assessments, but were later told that they could not – that all interim assessments had to be traditional, one-period, paper-and-pencil tests (that do include some writing). Some edicts were downright silly or frustrating. For example, some teachers were told they could not include suggested answer length (e.g. 3-5 sentences or 1-2 paragraphs) in directions – a common practice in our classrooms – because the PARCC tests won’t.

What we are left with is teacher labor making the best of the often baffling demands of administration to produce curricula about which no one I know is enthusiastic. Left to our own devices, yet still tasked with meeting the state mandates, we would have created curricula that look significantly different from the ones we did.

Have you heard the curricula developed over the summer will not inhibit teacher creativity?

Dr. MacCormack and the BOE have gone to great lengths to assure the community that they value teacher creativity and that it will remain unaffected by the new curricula and assessments. This is next to impossible. While it is true that, as Dr. MacCormack and the Board say, the curricula prescribe what to teach, not how to teach it, creativity and autonomy are compromised. The interim assessments dictate pacing – pacing I might otherwise do differently based on relevance, my own expertise, emergent issues, and co-construction with students based on their interests. In the name of time, I have already significantly altered one of my favorite projects, also a student favorite, and will almost definitely have to abandon a major historiographical essay assignment I give during my unit on World War Two (an essay we were going to use as an interim assessment in our new curriculum until we were told we had to do a test instead). Increased conformity and homogeneity will, by default, decrease flexibility and creativity. (Below, I address how the sample SGOs included in the interim assessments potentially discourage use of projects and portfolios.)

Have you heard the interim assessments are just like any other unit assessment and are not counting more than any other test?

If you want to call an entire quarter’s worth of material a unit (I’ve never seen a teacher do that until now), then yes, the interim assessments are simply unit tests. In truth, they are more like quarterly exams. These are not “just like any other test” we give. In 12 years of teaching, I’ve never seen a teacher give one test on a quarter’s worth of content, let alone count it the same as an earlier test that covered 2 to 3 weeks of material (what we would normally call “units”). These interim tests cover the most material of any assessment I will give in a marking period, so they should have a higher point value (within reason) than those other assessments, shouldn’t they? Are we being asked to diminish their value because we are trying to mollify a rightfully critical community? Is that the educationally sound decision to make? Are we diminishing their value in order to stick to the narrative that these are not “high stakes” tests? Speaking of high stakes, since many of us will be using these tests to calculate our performance on student growth objectives (SGOs), and since the portion of teachers’ evaluations determined by SGOs (and an even more ludicrous criterion, SGPs) will grow in the next few years, and since those evaluations could potentially be used to more easily revoke tenure and make other personnel decisions, these tests will become fairly “high stakes” for teachers. If your job was on the line, would you change how you treated these tests? And would you want them to have higher stakes for students so they took them seriously?

Furthermore, many of us in English Language Arts (ELA) and Social Studies rarely use traditional, one-period, paper-and-pencil tests throughout the quarter, and are now being asked to use them as interim assessments. To be fair to students – to better prepare them for the interim tests -- we may have to further alter our assessment practices and give more traditional tests throughout the quarter. (Dampened creativity, anyone?)

The push for more standardized tests (nay, "common assessments") of the type we are being told to develop (traditional, paper-and-pencil, easily scored/quantified) makes more sense when we consider the district has purchased several new scantron machines to score the interim assessments and save data into a computer -- and that teachers whose already written and approved interim assessments do not fit these new machines easily are being called to CO (by a new hire in charge of apparently only this scantron process) to edit their tests to make them more scantron-friendly.

Have you heard that teachers don’t have to use the interim assessments for their SGOs?

This is completely true; but the district has made it very easy to use interim assessments for these purposes by including sample test-based SGOs with the pre-assessments. Developing a performance-based or project-based SGO will require much more work for teachers. For example, the “pre-assessment” for such alternatives would have to almost exactly replicate the project or portfolio being used later, which isn’t simple (especially compared to using tests that way) and doesn’t always make sense for a teacher’s curriculum. If I wanted to base an SGO on how my students performed on a mock trial of Richard Nixon, I’d have to develop a mock trial on another topic that I might never otherwise use just to utilize it as a pre-assessment for the Nixon trial. And we still have to give the interim tests, whether we are using them for SGOs or not. With all the changes going on and the myriad demands on our time, how many of us are going to go out of our way to make project-based SGOs? The truth is, the district has made it very easy for us to take a “path of least resistance” and just use the interim tests for our SGOs, leading many of us to believe it's a way of pushing us toward the type of "data" they want to use at CO.

Let’s assume I do use the interim assessments for SGOs. The only content that will count for this purpose is that which is on both the pre-test and the fourth interim assessment. There are several problems. This is potentially a very narrow slice of curriculum (unless we just make the tests all about ELA standards and devalue subject content, a common complaint in Science and Social Studies). This also makes much of the pre-test less relevant. In almost all cases, when educators use the term “pre-test” it is a test that is exactly the same test as the “post-test” (in this case the post-test would be the fourth interim assessment), or at least measures exactly the same thing as the post-test. A true pre-test for the fourth interim assessment would have been something almost exactly the same as that test. True, the content not shared by both the pre-test and fourth interim assessment will still be useful to measure student growth on first, second, and third interim assessments, but is next to useless for the purposes of SGOs. But wait – there’s more. The district determined test-based SGOs would be based on student growth between the pre-assessment and the fourth marking period assessment, but the latter is administered four to five weeks after the state needs to know if we’ve met our SGOs and four to five weeks after when annual summative staff evaluations are done – something no one seems to have taken into account.

Have you heard there are no classes over 30 at the high school?

False. Several still are. And there are a few classes out of compliance with regard to special education regulations. To be fair, we were not allowed to hire enough staff to avoid this at first (let alone to make the 24-student class-size cap in the core subjects a reality), and the MHS administration is currently working hard on solving these issues. But when Dr. MacCormack made that statement, it was false.