Safe Cracking with Feynman - Numberphile

Saving the School

I just finished a book titled Saving the School by Michael Brick.  It is about the efforts of the principal, teachers, parents and students to bring up the test scores at Reagan High School in Austin Texas to prevent the school’s closure.  It is an interesting story and I think it really highlights the fact that it takes more than simply hard studying to bring up scores.  The principal worked very hard throughout the year to include students and parents in her efforts to save the school and to bring up the school’s collective image of itself from “academically unacceptable” to “worthwhile.”  This is a good read.  Brick puts together a narrative that is easy to follow and weaves together the personal stories of the principal, a teacher, a coach, several students and other support staff as they struggle through what could possibly be the last year for Reagan High. 

I realize that the story is abstracted from Brick’s personal experience and written from his point of view, but it surprises me that no one seemed angry about the fact that Reagan was deemed unacceptable because of one point on one subgroup in the entire school even after radically bringing up scores for all subgroups.  No one even questions whether or not the tests were bad for the students, bad for teaching, worthwhile or even valid measures of what might happen for that student later in life.   No one ever expresses the kind of anger they ought to be feeling over an education system that creates such a mess in the first place. 

What they did is truly laudable—make no mistake about it.  It just makes me wonder how many folks are out there buying the federal government’s schtick about what makes a bad school or a good school without any questions.  I also have to wonder where the civil right’s lawyers are in this mess.  Since Black and Latino students are the ones who get the shaft worst whenever any kind of “consequences” are doled out over the “academically unacceptable” label up to and including school closures, why aren’t there lawyers lining up to sue the state or federal government over policies that clearly create a greater racial divide even while purporting to narrow it. 

Brick did mention the charters waiting like vultures to swoop in and take things over once Reagan closed.  He also talked about all of the companies selling their “pass the test” study programs on back to school night.  What a racket!  These people get money from the federal government for every student they enroll in their programs after the federal government wrote the law that allows states to declare schools incompetent in the first place.   If the federal government plowed that same amount of money into the school, they might not have dropped so low to begin with!

The bottom line is that while I didn’t get any brilliant teaching ideas out of reading the book, it was a very inspirational read.  

And so it begins... again...

As I go through this journey, I’m having flashbacks to my days in college learning to teach over 20 years ago.  The types of learning, the approaches that we need to do instead of “teaching to the test” are exactly what I was learning about back then.  Inquiry, guided discovery, writing across the curriculum, constructivism, cooperative learning—this stuff is so old it’s new again. 

And I did use some of these methods when I started out teaching.  Still do occasionally (usually after the testing), so what happened?  Well, it turns out that lecturing is just a lot easier than any other method.  So it’s easy and natural to get lazy and fall into more and more lecture.  For me, with six preps, it was a matter of survival a lot of the time.  

Administrators like it when they walk into your classroom and see you lecturing and the students sitting quietly taking notes.  Never mind that 80% of those same students are completely checked out mentally—it looks good!  On the other hand, say an administrator were to walk into a classroom where 80% of the kids were engaged.  Maybe they would be working on their computers or using their smartphones to look up information.  I would get slammed for the 20% of the students who weren’t engaged.  But which is preferable?  In the end, where is more actual learning taking place?

So now I’m pulling out some of my old activities and trying to figure out how I can incorporate them again.  I’m also looking for authentic problems that I could have my students try to solve.  There are a lot of resources out there now that weren’t available 20 years ago.  Heck!  I don’t think the Internet was really that available 20 years ago (I think it was sort of around, just not all that useful yet).  I'm also searching for authentic projects I can use to inspire my students.  The salient question is whether or not I'll be able to conjure up enough resources to get 6 math classes through a whole year.    

So what is it all about?

This journey I’m embarking on has been simmering and percolating under the surface for quite a few years now.  It started, not coincidentally, with the new and improved emphasis on standardized testing for all.  At first, I didn’t really change what I taught and things seemed to be chugging along okay.  My students didn’t do great, but we are a very small school so we didn’t have a lot of valid data to work with and I would try to read the reports and tweak a few things every year that might help bring up scores.  But nothing worked.  The more I tried to get students to score better, the worse their scores got!  Finally, in the last few years, I felt like I was just bludgeoning them over the head with released test questions and rules and detentions and whatever was necessary to “tighten things up,” which I was certain would ultimately lead to better test scores.  It never did. 

For the last few years, I’ve begun to recognize a disturbing trend.  Low morale among the students caused by bludgeoning and tightening and an inordinate focus on testing has created a backlash.  Before, I think they would sort of try.  Now I think they are intentionally blowing the tests out of anger and spite.  And honestly?  I don’t blame them. 

Part of me wishes my students had stellar test scores so that I could say “look, my scores are great and I still hate testing.” 

Because you know the first thing someone is gong to do is look up my test scores and say “Who are you to speak?  Look how crappy your scores are.”

Part of me wonders if I would be as magnanimous and understanding if I had great scores.  I’d hate to be that teacher in a privileged neighborhood saying “I don’t know what’s wrong with those other teachers—getting high test scores is easy!”  (Yeah, just move to Palo Alto.)

So I consider it a blessing that I am responsible for such crappy test scores because it has made me seriously reconsider the way I am doing things and my reasons for doing them. 

And when the going gets tough, what do I do?  I read.  So I’ll talk about some of the books that have influenced me as I take this trip. 

The first book I read is Role Reversal, by Mark Barnes.  Barnes really turns teaching on its head—no rules, no homework, no tests, no grades, huh?  You’ll have to read the book if you want to know how it turns out, but you know it is good because who would write a book about teaching methods that don’t work? 

Me?  I like his ideas.  I’m not sure how I’m going to apply them to a high school math program where I am teaching 6 different classes.  Barnes teaches middle school English so you can see I’ve got my work cut out for me.