Of Course They Cheated

I read, with exactly no surprise at all, about the cheating "scandal" at Stuyvesant High School when it came out in the newspapers back in June. What I was hoping for, which the New York Times delivered a couple of days ago, was an article that interviewed students and examined the motivations behind the cheating. The reporter obviously had the "competitive kids cheated to outcompete each other" narrative in her head at the outset, but she did an admirable job of coming to terms with the fact that most of the acknowledged cheating at Stuyvesant is actually collaborative, not competitive. It comes from an "us-vs-them" mentality more than from a desire to beat other kids to the Ivy League.

The funny thing is that, while the adults run around and look for a rational explanation for what happened, the kids themselves answered the question two years ago in an editorial in the school paper:

We are a school that puts far more emphasis on the quantitative value of numbers and statistics than on the importance of learning and knowledge. The work assigned in many classes reflects this approach to education. Busywork assignments asking students to perform onerous tasks, such as copying down physics problems verbatim from a Regents review book, send a clear message that deep, conceptual understanding of material is worthless when compared to high scores on a standardized test. 

Boom, done, QED. The kids knew it two years ago. Not only did they know it, but they wrote a beautiful, expressive, deeply analytical editorial and put it where everybody could see it. They gave the adults in their community every chance to know it too. Obviously, some—maybe even a majority—of the adults in the Stuyvesant community did know it. After all, somebody nurtured those young writers as they thought critically, wrote with voice, and bravely published it all in a school newspaper. Apparently, though, the key decision makers continued their emphasis on quantifying learning through empty performance measures and failed to lead—or even just allow—the faculty to teach a more honest, engaged curriculum.

I've taught at schools quite similar to Stuy, and I'd say a majority of my colleagues have gone for depth over quantity. Great teachers recognize that practice only matters in the context of purpose, and I've had the privilege to work almost exclusively with great teachers. I'm betting this is the case at Stuyvesant too. But the Regents exam, the place in which the most startlingly huge level of cheating came to light, is exactly the place where you'd expect it to if you only realized that the more empty and soulless the work, the more likely you are to inspire a student to cheat on it.

When 9% of your junior class is involved in a single cheating ring, it's not the students who created the problem. They're 17 years old. They're responding to their environment, one they didn't create. If 10% or 20% or 30% of your students are doing something, it's because they're being told to. You may not like the message they're getting, but when something like this happens, you need to tune into the signals you're broadcasting, whether you like what you're picking up or not.

Admission to Stuyvesant is based solely on students' performance on a single standardized test. The top performers on it are admitted, and the rest aren't. Unsurprisingly, it's a test that purports to measure aptitude in verbal and mathematical ability. So when you admit a group of students under these conditions to the "top" high school in the city, you've just told them what it takes to get ahead in life: the score. It doesn't matter if a kid has gamed the test, cheated, or whether he's simply been tutored half to death on the test format. If he scores that magic percentile, he's in.

According to the articles I've linked here, that mentality continues throughout students' time at Stuy. Like I said, I'm sure that many—my guess is most—members of the faculty there actually attempt to push kids away from the pursuit of excellent scores and towards the pursuit of excellence itself, but how effective can they be when a student's access to the school is based on a test score, a student's midlife at the school centers around the Regents, and a student's college access is largely based on SAT and AP test scores?

The school can say all it wants that students should be honest, and they can "redouble" their efforts to teach students to be more honest. They can say that "all students would have to review and sign an honor policy that promises punishment for those who fail to turn in cheats," which they're apparently doing for this year, but the music and the words don't go together. The system tells the kids what's really important, and the adults who offer an alternative simply sound like well-intentioned delusional idealists.

The school needs to reevaluate the work that is inspiring the cheating. If large numbers of students are cheating on an assignment, it's the assignment that needs to change, not the rules that already prohibit cheating. The vast majority of students default to honesty and only cheat when they feel lost, overwhelmed, or confused about the real message of their institution. But any change the faculty makes will quite likely fail to address the deeper issues, which begin with the whole premise on which the school is founded and are perpetuated by a state exam that the faculty can't do away with.

Until our whole institutions are designed around the idea of education as a process of helping minds develop, rather than helping kids perform on an abstract measurement (and the more abstract, the more destructive), we should expect the achievement gap to get worse as more low-performing students are alienated from the system and more high-performing students tweak their test scores ever higher with ever less focus on honesty and excellence.

A B.A. in Knight Errantry

My friend Jeff Nunokawa semi-famously uses Facebook notes to publish mini-essays that meditate on quotes, concepts, faces, photos, or whatever else sparks an interesting thought. The one from this morning really paused me for a moment. It looks like it sparked by a plate with an illustration of Don Quixote on it that he saw at a tourist trap somewhere in his travels. I've always found the image or the recollection of Don Quixote gives me a little thrill up my spine, so it still speaks to me even from a cheesy decorative plate. To believe in something so impractically noble and to pursue it to the point of delusion is simultaneously laughable and deeply inspiring. What is more literary than the ridiculous shaking hands with the sublime?

Besides, if he sits around, tight and quiet, worrying about the daily dividends of his dream-work (what are you going to do with a B.A. in Knight Errantry?) or what others think of his devotion to it, he might well miss his chance when his turn comes to stand and speak the wake-up call.

For Jeff this morning to catch that feeling so perfectly, right when I was thinking—as I do on some cool Tuesday mornings when I pass the lake and wish I could stop and photograph herons in the dawn fog instead of going to school—that teaching English is a sort of perpetual windmill-tilt, well it was a little piece of magic.

So I think I'll keep working towards my M.A. in Knight Errantry. I'll drop a little Chaucer on the seniors and a little Steinbeck on the Freshmen. I'll pretend that it matters every minute instead of worrying about the daily dividends, and I'll accept the indignity of the occasional unhorsing so I can be ready when my turn comes to stand and speak the wake-up call.

Blog Setup 2012

On the Sample Student Blog, I've posted a full blog setup tutorial updated to reflect changes to Westport and Google's systems this year. However, my students have already done many of these steps in class, so I'm posting a shorter tutorial of the settings they need to change this week. Some of you may have already made some of these changes, but please make sure all your settings are in line with this tutorial so your blog functions properly.

Log into your school Google account. Don't forget that you may need to log out of any personal Google accounts first in order to prevent confusion. You can go to gmail.westport.k12.ct.us or use the Gmail link that appears on the lower right when you first log into Blackboard.

If you're at the correct login page, you'll see this box:

If you see a regular Google login page, you're in the wrong place.

Once you're logged in, you'll be in Westport Gmail. Your account will be listed in the upper right corner, so you can take a quick look there to make sure you're logged in with your Westport account instead of with a personal account.

At the top of the Gmail screen, there are different Google Apps. You want Blogger, which is typically listed under "More." Just click "More" and then select "Blogger."

Now you should see your blogger dashboard. It looks like this:

I have multiple blogs under my account, but you'll only have the one you just made. The orange button with the picture of a pencil on it creates a new post. The little picture of documents next to that takes you to a list of all the posts you've written (which is nothing yet). The little arrow next to that will pop of a list of different things you can change about your blog, but what we're interested in right now is "Settings," so click the little arrow and then click "Settings."

That takes you to a page with this lefthand menu of all the settings you can tweak. Please set the following items according to the instructions so your blog gets setup properly for class.

Under "Basic" (which is where you should be already), make this change:

For "Blog Readers" click "Edit," then "Only these readers." You should get an "add readers" button. Click that and paste in the e-mail list of your class (which should be emailed by your teacher to your Gmail address).  You can also add additional readers by typing their names or school Gmail addresses.

Click the orange "Save Changes" button at the bottom.

Now pick "Posts and comments" from the lefthand menu. Note: you want "Posts and comments" under "Settings," not the big "Comments" item further up the menu.

For "Who Can Comment," select "Users with Google Accounts."
For "Comment Moderation," select "Never."
For "Word Verification" switch it from "yes" to "no."

Click "Save Settings" in the upper right corner.

Now pick "Mobile and email" from the lefthand menu.

Under "Comment Notification E-mail," enter your school Gmail address and your teacher's school e-mail address ([firstinitial]lastname@westport.k12.ct.us).
Under "Email posts to," enter your teacher's school e-mail address again.

Click "Save" in the upper right corner.

Now pick "Language and formatting" from the lefthand menu.
Under "Time Zone" pick (GMT-05:00 Eastern Time).

Click "Save" in the upper right corner.

You're done! You're ready to start writing, sharing, and reflecting. That wasn't so bad, right?

Nathan's Sleep Tips

In Personalized Study Skills today, students discussed their goals for the year. I had asked them to share something they wanted to improve about their work habits and to give some concrete steps—even teeny ones—they might take towards them.

One of my students was talking about his difficulty staying awake in classes. The obvious step was to go to bed a bit earlier, but he said he had tried that and had a lot of difficulty getting to sleep, even when he lies in bed with the lights out. Another student drew up a list of tips for getting to sleep that I thought I'd share here, since they're pretty awesome.

Ways to fall asleep:

• Read a book. Do not use any electronics 20 minutes before going to sleep.
• Don't have any sugar or caffeine before sleep. No caffeine 4-5 hours before sleep and no sugar 1-2 hours before sleep. If you do have sugar or caffeine before sleep, water it down with two glasses of water and one glass of chocolate or regular milk.
• Drink chocolate milk 20-30 minutes before bed. It can be cold.
• When reading or whatever before bed, use a low light setting.
• Turn off all lights, including alarm clock lights.

Ways to stay awake:

• Chew mint gum—instant awake.
• Don't think calming thoughts.
• Read off an LCD screen instead of off paper.

Anybody else have some suggestions on good ways to fall asleep at appropriate times and how to keep yourself alert at appropriate times? My personal addition to Nathan's list is that since the half-life of caffeine in the body is approximately 5 hours, it may make sense to cut off your caffeine even longer before bed than Nathan suggests, particularly if you have chronic trouble falling asleep at an appropriate time.

Developing Collaborative Skills

This year, Kristin Veenema and I continued to pilot the use of online tools to increase student collaboration. In September, we set ourselves the specific goal of tracking the improvement in collaborative skills. We tracked individual students and looked for increased use of collaborative language and the corresponding increase in depth and creativity of ideas.

Throughout the year, students posted both formal and informal writing assignments on blogs and were asked to comment on each other's ideas in specific, non-evaluative ways. Students were asked to avoid both making quality statements (i.e., "your thesis is good") and to avoid offering advice for improvement (i.e., "you need to blend your quotes more smoothly"). Instead, they were encouraged to respond to ideas by talking about how they spark other ideas. For example, one assignment might ask a student to write a working thesis for a paper topic and to post a quotation that might be used in that paper. Then, the followup exercise would ask students to find new textual evidence that went along with another student's working thesis and to include it in a comment on the original post. These frequent, informal posts were graded on their degree of engagement, rather than on correctness, length, structure, or even creativity. That is, students were scored based on how seriously they seem to be taking each other, and how specifically they respond to what they were reading.

For example, after studying some poems and poetic techniques, students were asked to find their own poems and to write about something they learned from the poem. The next assignment was to read other students' poetry posts and to write a new post detailing something they'd learned from a classmate. On that final assignment, Diego A. wrote the following:

I was especially intrigued by what Parker had to say. As Parker described, by looking at the last two lines of the poem you can tell that the author didn't just say how much love there is; to the contrary, the author actually gave a great example of what love meant to him. I think this is great because sometimes I find myself saying plain things with no particular significance and that are sometimes clichéd. This poem is a great example of what I should be striving for in order to improve my writing.

Here Diego shows both the ability to respond to Parker's idea and to internalize the subsequent synthesized idea. What's really telling about his response is the fact that he was able to take a very broadly defined assignment—"read several other students' posts on poetry and then write about something you learned"—and use collaborative language authentically. He wasn't asked to apply the poem to his own writing style or to discuss clichés, but after a whole school year of seeing and using those collaborative models, he was able to do respond creatively, authentically, and independently.

After a year of practice, all students were able to mobilize these skills much more efficiently and effectively than they could in September. Their first attempts at this kind of collaboration were typically much more stilted, much shorter, and much more focused on the kinds of corrective responses that students often think constitute "peer editing"—often despite explicit instructions not to do so. The early attempts at analysis were similarly undeveloped, and even with explicit instructions to mention a classmate's ideas, even engaged students struggled to do so in more than a cursory fashion. After a few weeks, though, collaboration and collaborative language both get internalized, and students start to interact more freely and productively. By May, the improvement was dramatic across the board.

With online publishing, both the student and the teacher have quick access to the entire year's work, so the student can be asked to go back and reflect on his improvement, and the teacher can go back and drill down into an individual student's progress at any time. Students can go back and tag work as part of a portfolio or reference it in self-reflective writing on their own progress and goals.

As always, students wrote, far, far more than I could ever read. They still submitted two or more formal papers per quarter that were graded, returned, and redrafted, but they also wrote multiple posts and comments on their blogs, typically on the same concepts that would later appear in formally graded papers. I graded a sporadic selection (think Skinnerian reinforcement schedules) for degree of engagement, but the amount of writing was predicated on Dixie Goswami's theory that if you have time to read everything your students are writing, your students aren't writing nearly enough. Everything a student writes is read by their teacher or their classmates, so the accountability is still there, and is in many ways more authentic than the accountability of a grade.

For students who lack skills or engagement, online collaboration is no panacea, but it does provide an opportunity to engage many struggling students. The kids that write cursory traditional work and skip assignments will start out writing cursory collaborative work, and they'll still skip assignments. However, when a student is missing work and comes into a class in which students are reading each other's work, the missing work is held doubly accountable. Not only with the teacher disapprove, but other classmates must now work around the gap in the class's material. The collaborative process is helping us catch more of our struggling students earlier on, and it's giving students who struggle with skills a low-risk environment to practice with ideas before being asked to develop their skills by deploying those ideas on a formal assignment.

Kristin and I also used the blogs for a cross-class collaboration. Her students read Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as mine read his Nine Stories. When my students started Catcher, they read some material from Kristin's class, as her class read some of my class's material on Nine Stories. So as my students were beginning to form impressions about Holden Caulfield and the themes of Catcher, they were able to turn to a wealth of authentic material. Later, Kristin's class posted direct responses to my students' writing on Catcher as my students posted on her students' writing on Nine Stories.

For example, my student Andy F., in response to the question "What are the conflicts between what Holden values and what he thinks the world values?" wrote, "I'd have to say it would be trying to impress or accomodate everyone.  Holden seems to mention this a lot by refering to it as 'phony' or 'corny.'" Kristin's student, Daniel G., wrote a response that included the statement "Holden doesn't see this phoniness in children, and he wants to keep them sincere." In a subsequent essay on success, Andy explores a related idea: "that we are just too blinded by what we think we are expected to do by others, is when we end up trying to follow the wrong set of guidelines, hoping to reach success."

This interaction is just a teeny example of something that happened at least four other times in Andy's work on Catcher and dozens of times across that class. Students generated their own ideas, identified relevant ideas in other students' work, and progressed to deeper, more evidence-based understanding of each text.

We also noticed that by combining classes and thus adding a less-known group to each student's audience, we refreshed the students' sense of complacency and safety. They stepped up their game a bit when they had a less familiar group as an audience. After working as a class for much of the year, they can develop a complacency about doing less than their best. Increasing the audience gave them a nice shot in the arm.

When students consistently publish both process material and polished, formal material, they write with greater authenticity. The assignment becomes less of a game of pleasing the teacher and more of an exercise in finding something interesting to say, especially when they know that their work won't just be read but will also be used to generate responses. The intense focus on process also removes some of the motivation to short circuit the writing process by looking for the "answers" online. Students can go to each other for insights and simply cite the post they used as a springboard for their own ideas. Struggling students can look at the work of successful classmates for models, and even the strongest students also benefit from the exchange.

I've used this method for two years now, and I'm not going back. Kristin and I have been able to create a small academic community of literary thinkers and writers who spend the year in dialogue about the ideas they read about and the ideas they generate. Kids are getting more practice and more opportunities to write authentically, and they end up with more legitimate, interesting papers. The software itself is irrelevant. We use Blogger right now, but we're not really "blogging" per se. We could use any software that allowed us to publish, share, and organize with a minimum of logistical fuss.

A Smaller Class Makes a Huge Difference

I occasionally reference Staples High School's large class sizes, so I thought I'd break down some of the math of how relatively small differences in class size turn into relatively large differences for individual kids. With section sizes frequently approaching 30 students, I'm not sure everybody realizes what a big difference it is when you can make sections even slightly smaller.

When it comes to giving feedback on student writing, one of the most fundamental parts of teaching kids how to write like college students or professional adults, it's shocking what a small difference in section size ends up meaning for a kid.

Say I have 120 hours of time a quarter (about 12 hours a week) to devote to giving individualized feedback on kids' written work. If I have 29 kids in all 4 sections, that's 464 drafts of papers (2 papers with 2 drafts each per kid) I have to grade. That gives me 15 minutes per draft. It would be nigh-impossible to find much more time than that, so the kids probably won't get any more than that bare minimum. In reality, many drafts take longer than that, and we probably devote more than 12 hours a week to individual feedback, but you get the idea.

Let's do the same math with class sizes of 22. That's 352 drafts a quarter. At 15 minutes each, that's roughly 90 hours of work. That leaves me 30 of my grading hours to divide among my kids. That means I can devote over 20 minutes per kid per quarter to additional feedback. That could mean a whole other paper, or another draft of a revised paper. It could mean time for an alternative assignment, like a presentation. If I devote it to an additional paper, that means that a kid gets something like a 30% increase in direct feedback on writing and a greater-than-30% increase in the amount of writing assigned.

In the classroom, an oversized section cuts the individual attention and time each kid gets. In a 19th-century model, that doesn't seem so bad. Who cares how many kids are listening if the teacher is just lecturing and making them copy notes off the board? As long as he can keep control of the room, it doesn't really matter if he's got 22 or 29 kids. I think a lot of people who don't find the class size issue so urgent are suffering under the misconception that good teaching is done with the teacher in front of the room and the students in orderly rows, copying down facts.

In an excellent 21st-century classroom, however, kids are rarely just copying things down. They're discussing, researching, problem-solving, owning their own ideas, presenting concepts, receiving feedback, working individually, or working together, all dependent on whatever model is best for the given material.

Small shifts in class size result in dramatic shifts in the education a student can receive. In a 50 minute class with 29 kids, there's time to give each kid 103 seconds of individualized attention, whether that means a chance to speak his or her mind in discussion or time with the teacher looking over his or her shoulder, giving pointers on individual or group work. In a class of 22, that's 136 seconds each. Over the year (145 class sessions), that's 80 more minutes of individualized instruction a kid gets in a class of 22 versus a class of 29. In the smaller class, each kid gets over 1/3 more time to test out ideas, practice presentation skills, gain confidence, and get direct teacher support.

There's also a significant diseconomy of scale in a larger class. Tasks like handing books out or getting a class's attention take disproportionately longer with each kid you add. That procedural diseconomy takes minutes away from real instruction and individual attention. So in the larger class, the kid gets smaller proportion of a pie that's smaller in the first place.

Those feedback and class time numbers obviously don't take into account many of the vagaries of real-world teaching, but the ratios are roughly accurate when it comes to the amount of individual instruction and feedback a student gets. If we taught only lecture-based courses, class size would have little impact, but world-class educators don't teach with that assembly-line mentality because we aren't trying to create assembly line workers. A world-class education demands that we keep class sizes down, and even the most meager reductions in class size pay off disproportionately in the education our kids get.

To put it very simply, reducing class size by 25% results in at least a 30% increase in the support and individual attention a student gets, both in and out of the classroom. We have to fight to keep class sizes as small as we possibly can if we want to lay claim to meaningful leadership in education.

The False Premise of Standardized Testing

In the 2008 CAPT test, one editing and revising question asked the following:

What is the best change, if any, to make in the sentence in line 8 (The showdown occured in a local tavern.)?
a. Insert a comma after showdown.
b. Change occured to occurred.
c. Change local to locally.
d. Make no change.

Some grammatical knowledge—or an eye trained by lots of previous reading—would enable a student to knock off A and C very quickly. However, unless he happens to know the spelling of "occurred," a student is reduced to guessing between B and D. Why is this the kind of measurement we want to make more important in our schools?

I heard several students complaining that this year's CAPT had multiple questions that ultimately came down to spelling; is this not a sign that the disconnect between real educating and standardized measurement of it is broadening by the day?

My argument isn't that students don't need to know how to spell. They certainly do. One of the hallmarks of a skilled, effective writer is that he or she uses the spellchecker as a tool rather than simply following its guidance blindly. However, do we really believe that the spelling of "occurred" is an effective benchmark of a 10th grade student's learning? And are we ready to double down on this premise and others of its ilk?

If we have 10th graders who lack reading and writing skills, the answer is not to drill that population with spelling exercises. I can think of few things less productive in the attempt to take an illiterate student and make him literate. A student whose background, experience, and schooling have left him insufficiently literate needs creativity, resilience, and independence, combined with a good book taught by a passionate teacher, not an extra lesson on when to double consonants in past tense verbs. But if you tell that teacher that his salary and job security are going to be tied to the test scores of this student, which do you think the student is going to get?

There are certainly parts of CAPT that are focused more on writing and thinking skills than arbitrary knowledge, but they cause a similar problem because they lead teachers to overemphasize test preparation. For example, there's a writing section on CAPT in which students analyze a short story. As preparation, you could simply teach your students how to write analytically and how to use literary evidence to advance and deepen an idea. We already teach that because we believe that looking deeply at a story helps improve a student's analytical and creative skills while also teaching students to create honest viewpoints based on evidence. Hopefully, that focus on crucial skills would also lead to higher test scores.

However, you can't trust that teaching the real skills will be accurately measured by that section, since it offers the kids a mediocre short story and four short responses in which to demonstrate their skills. Kids who don't read or write quickly enough won't have a chance to develop their best ideas, and the stories typically don't offer enough nuance and depth for a truly interesting piece of writing. So if you want your kids to have high scores, you'll teach them strategies for gaming the maximum number of points on that section. Teaching these test-taking strategies offers the greatest possible chance for overall score improvement but the least fruitful educational experience.

Which do you think is already winning in Connecticut? Emphasis on the importance of tests pushes teachers away from focusing on challenging literature and creative thought about it and towards reductive, gather-the-points practice exercises. Sadly, these practices are already far too common in Connecticut schools, and the lower a school's performance on CAPT, the more pressure there is to shift more of the curriculum towards this reductive test preparation. In this way, I really believe that the CAPT and CMT system is already making the achievement gap worse by teaching our at-risk kids how to take tests rather than the skills necessary for the most interesting and rewarding careers.

As a teacher, I could assign my kids Macbeth and develop assignments that nurture their creativity, presentation skills, and analytical writing skills. Or, I could assign a series of lower reading level short stories of the sort that are used on CAPT and have my students spend class time writing timed responses that hit all the scoring areas on the CAPT rubric.

Right now, I do a whole lot of the first kind of thing and very little of the second, because I have the luxury at this school of knowing that the vast majority of my kids will do just fine on CAPT even if I put a whole lot of emphasis on things CAPT ignores, like creative thinking, presentation skills, and the real-life applications of the literary study of human nature. But if I'm forced into a situation in which I need to show year-over-year test score improvement in order to keep the highest level of teacher certification and 5-10% (or more) of my salary, I'll have little choice but to shift even more of my kids' class and homework time toward reductive test preparation.

Design a test that measures the real life skills we want our kids to have, and I'll happily teach to it. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “This business of teaching to the test is exactly what we should do, as long as the test reflects what we want them to learn.” He'd be right if a standardized test could really reflect what we want kids to learn. Show me a test that really measures the most important, hardest to teach things, and I'd love to teach to it. The reality is, though, that our tests mostly don't measure those things, and even in the limited ways that they do, it's easier and more time-efficient to teach kids how to take the test than to teach them real-life skills that only partly help them in a testing situation. Our politicians don't seem to understand that, and that failure of understanding leads them to take actions that will hurt our students in the long run.

They act as if our tests provide a legitimate measurement of the most important kinds of student learning. If that false premise were true, the rest of their actions would be admirable. However, as my students learn,—despite the fact that no standardized test measures it—a false premise typically takes the rest of the chain of logic to a false conclusion.

Using these tests in teacher evaluations would require an expansion of the CMT and CAPT system to measure every kid, every year. The only way to know if a teacher has made a test score contribution is to look at the year-over-year improvement of students under that teacher. We already blow seven instructional days over the course of two weeks for the 10th graders just to take the test itself, not including the instructional time wasted on test prep in the preceding months. If our problem is that kids aren't learning enough, devoting more time to testing across the entire high school moves us away from our goal. It's worse than useless.

The larger the role standardized test scores take in our teachers' and schools' evaluations, the more reductive and alienating the school experience becomes, particularly for the students at the most risk. We need to evaluate effective teaching so we can help struggling teachers improve and weed out the teachers who can't or won't teach effectively. But let's stop pretending that a year-over-year improvement on test scores can tell us whether real learning has taken place.

Westport's Big Opportunity: Step One

It's becoming clearer and clearer that most of our popular trends in education reform are pushing us farther and farther in the wrong direction. Test scores seem to be about the only thing our national leaders can agree on as a measurement of academic proficiency, and school funding is increasingly tied to these destructively inadequate measurements.

At the same time, we weep over the increasing distance in our educational system relative to the much-lauded Finland, which is going in a diametrically opposite direction in nearly every reform category. Finland beats us in test scores and yet spends no time at all preparing students for standardized tests and doesn't track its students' progress with them. Finland also doesn't improve its teachers and schools punitively by tying their salaries and funding to test scores; instead, it recruits top academic performers and then gives them the freedom to teach well.

You cannot remove teacher autonomy and replace it with a playbook, no matter how well-researched that playbook is. A child is not a McDonald's hamburger, and he cannot be educated according to a three ring binder. Frankly, even the hamburgers don't come out that well when you make them that way. There is no great education without a great teacher, and attracting, retaining, and training great teachers is a cornerstone of a great school; if you can't do that, then all your other efforts are just lipstick on a pig.

But I'm not interested—today at least—in decrying the national bipartisan run to the wrong endzone. I'm interested in Westport, which has a unique opportunity to show us the way forward for our public schools. In part, that's because Westport has very few of the common obstacles that impede student progress, and in part, it's because many of Westport's key players are looking hard for ways to improve the system.

If we're going to succeed in setting the gold standard for American education here, we need to embrace the lessons that both our successful competitors and good sense teach us, and we need to start with getting the best people and giving them the chance to create and teach world-class curriculum.

Westport is successful in hiring really good people, but it's struggling with creating the kind of environment that retains the best people and gives them the freedom to do their best work. All the non-tenured teachers—including yours truly—were formally fired last spring before being rehired, so in the midst of the "Westport 2025" reform conversations and the noble plans to create a better institution over the next decade, a substantial chunk of the staff was hunting for backup work because the district couldn't even guarantee them a job five months out.

Last spring was also when the Board of Ed passed a new technology policy that hamstrung many teachers' work with blogs and other social media. There were meetings to discuss changes, but as far as I know, the board has not passed any updated version of the policy.

So as step one, Westport needs to do a better job in fighting its budget battles without creating an atmosphere of insecurity and disrespect for its teachers. Obviously, we don't have unlimited funds to pour into the schools, and it's paramount that each dollar spent is spent on delivering real benefits to our students. However, there has to be a way to create that budgetary efficiency without undermining the educators who are actually in the rooms with the kids. Teachers don't teach their best when they aren't respected and have to worry about their financial security. In fact, if budget wrangling leads to that kind of personnel inefficiency, it probably ends up costing the district a lot more in reduced teaching than it saves.

Westport does a better job than most places and putting the curriculum into its experts' hands. Teachers create the curricula and then are given autonomy to teach it their own way. We're not tied to three-ring binders of each day's activities and assessments. We're free to use our own expertise and tailor our teaching to our individual students' needs. We achieve consistency through collaboration rather than through top-down decrees. This is something we do really well already, and we need to embrace it as central to our reform efforts.