Building a Better Curriculum--Brick by Brick

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Saturday November 30, 2013 · 2:35 PM PST

2013/11/30 · 14:35

Let’s imagine there are two schools for training architects and carpenters. In the first school, students are given access to every construction material you could possibly need—bricks, stone, glass, steel girders. In the other school, students are forced to make do with sticks and masking tape. Would it come as any surprise that students who graduated from the first school were equipped to design magnificent houses and monuments, while the students from the second school struggled to make anything beyond rudimentary huts?
Yet we find ourselves today in the middle of a great educational debate where one side—the reformers—is perpetually outraged that every student is not producing his or her own Parthenon or Taj Mahal. They offer one solution after the next—high stakes testing, merit pay, firing teachers, closing schools—without ever addressing the core issue. For our lowest performing students, no one is asking: where are the bricks?
The bricks I am talking about are not made of concrete or mortar, of course. Our students need something far sturdier, something not subject to cracking. Children require something substantial on which they can build the foundation of learning. The bricks they need are made of words. It is vocabulary, as much as anything else, that marks the difference between struggling and successful students in America’s schools. Until we begin to address this issue, all of our talk about fixing our education system is nothing but a blueprint for failure.
There is a great deal of research that shows the relationship between vocabulary levels and academic achievement. Three professors from the University of Pittsburgh—Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown and Linda Kucan—have done a remarkable job of explaining the implications of this data in a book called Bringing Words to Life. The results of their research are stark: successful third-grade students may have vocabularies equal to low-performing 12th graders. Successful high school seniors know four times as many words as their lower-performing peers.
It should come as no surprise that there is a strong correlation between a student’s vocabulary and a student’s socioeconomic background. Children coming from wealthier families tend to have larger vocabularies and a better grasp of the intricacies of the English language. These children are able to read challenging texts from an early age. They can gather information and process complex ideas while their peers with lower vocabularies are struggling to comprehend the words on the page. This vocabulary gap helps to explain why many children from poor communities tend to fall behind in the third grade: they simply cannot keep pace with more challenging assignments because they literally cannot understand what they are reading.
The implications are clear. Many if not most struggling students would benefit from rich vocabulary instruction. They need a massive infusion of words. They need the bricks to build their own learning, year by year, floor by floor, until finally they can join their more successful peers in the penthouse of knowledge.
Unfortunately, the people in charge of designing the educational curriculum have a different theory of design. There is an almost magical form of thinking going on—from the speeches of Michelle Rhee to the policies of Arne Duncan. The belief—crystallized in the Common Core Standards—is that all students, regardless of their circumstances, should be able to make sophisticated readings of complex texts, moving along at more-or-less the same rate, from grade to grade. Each year standardized tests will measure the results and each year we will be asked to share in the outrage that those students trapped the school of sticks and masking tape aren’t producing marble mansions.
A true school reform would involve creating a more flexible curriculum, one designed to meet the needs of students with low vocabularies. There are many different ways of accomplishing this. For some children, all that would be required are additional vocabulary sessions added to their daily schedules. But for many children, there would probably need to be a completely different set of lessons that focused on building vocabulary and language skills—a sequence of instruction that would move more slowly than the common core standards currently require, a curriculum that meets true learning needs. Schools would need to provide rich instruction at a student’s actual reading level, rather than force students to struggle with arbitrarily-defined “grade-level” texts.
There are two sets of concerns that must be addressed if schools were to restructure the syllabus in this manner. One is legitimate and the other is purely political. The legitimate concern is that a vocabulary-enrichment curriculum could become a kind of dumping ground for poor black and Hispanic students, a way of keeping them “off-the-books.” It will be imperative that a vocabulary enrichment curriculum is not designed as some kind of separate dumbed-down path to a worthless diploma. There would have to be a carefully designed time-frame for this kind of program, a clear-cut route back to grade-level goals. The purpose of such a curriculum is not to avoid but to prepare students for rigorous learning. Parents and educational advocates would have to be vigilant on this count.
The purely political concern would come from the reformers, who would insist that all children can learn at the same pace and that any other approach to education is nothing but the soft bigotry of low expectations. But this insistence is—and has always been--a kind of warped egalitarianism. Instead of addressing the different needs of each child, the reformers try to pretend that these differences either don’t exist or don’t matter. In the name of success, they are damning another generation of students to a cycle of failure. For too long the education debates have been dominated by heat instead of light: there are plenty of angry accusations about why our children are not learning but few discussions about what they should learn and how they can do it.
While I cannot pretend that vocabulary-building is the one true solution to the many vexing problems of education in America, I can say that my own work in rigorous vocabulary instruction for elementary school students has shown promising results. If nothing else, schools should be allowed to experiment, to see if this kind of instruction can help struggling students—maybe not today, maybe not in time for the tests, maybe not quickly enough to earn a commendation in the newspapers. But, perhaps, at the end of years of long hard work, a vocabulary-based approach to learning with leave struggling students with all the tools they need to build not just a shack in the wilderness but a magnificent bridge to a lifetime of success.

Ten Reasons Why Value-Added Assessments are Harmful to a Child’s Education

Poet Craig

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Monday March 11, 2013 · 6:39 PM PDT

2013/03/11 · 18:39

There may be no topic more controversial in the world of education than value-added assessment—essentially judging and ranking teachers based on how well they can get students to improve their scores on standardized tests. Almost all of the discussion has centered around the question of whether or not it is appropriate to make test scores the determining factor in a teacher’s performance rating. But beyond the headlines and the lawsuits, there is an issue that has gone completely unaddressed. No one is asking how value-added assessments may affect the very students that this evaluation system is intended to help. By my count, there are at least ten separate ways in which value-added assessment either does not accurately measure the needs of a student or is actually harmful to a child’s education. Until these flaws are addressed, value-added assessment will be nothing more than a toy for politicians and headline writers, not a serious tool for improving learning.

1. The premise of value-added assessment is that standardized tests are an accurate and decisive measure of student learning. In fact, standardized testing is neither definitive nor especially reliable. City and state exams are snapshots, not in-depth diagnostic tools.

2. Value-added assessments will ultimately require all students to take standardized exams, whether or not such examinations are developmentally appropriate. Kindergarteners and first graders will be subjected to the same pressures of high-stakes testing as older children.

3. Value-added assessments will dramatically increase the number of standardized tests for each student. Children will need to take exams in subjects such art, music and physical education in order to evaluate the teachers of these subjects.

4. The most successful students will get less enrichment work and more test prep. It is actually more difficult to improve the scores of gifted students since they have already done so well on standardized exams.

5. Teachers will need to avoid necessary remediation in order to attain short-term gains in test scores. Most standardized English tests require students to demonstrate high-order thinking skills, yet a growing body of academic research indicates that many children—especially those growing up in poverty—require huge boosts of vocabulary to function well in school. Teachers may be forced to forego a vocabulary-rich curriculum that would have the most long-term benefits for their children. Instead, they will have to focus on the skills that might help students gain an extra point or two on this year’s tests.

6. Value-added assessments operate on the assumption that student test scores should improve from year to year based on abstract mathematical formulas. The targeted goals for each student will not reflect professional assessments of each child’s needs and abilities.

7. Learning is not necessarily a linear process. Students do not necessarily progress in predictable patterns. Many English Language Learners, for instance, require several years of language acquisition before they can make dramatic leaps in learning. Teachers may be judged “ineffective” because the results of their hard work may not show up in test scores until three or four years later.

8. Value-added assessments will discourage teachers from working with the most challenging classes. There is nothing more rewarding for a professional educator than helping struggling learners thrive in school. But teachers might be reluctant to work with these children if they risk losing their jobs over disappointing test scores.

9. Value-added assessments do not evaluate a teacher’s overall teaching—they measure how well teachers prepare children for tests. There is a difference.

10. A school where teachers are evaluated by value-added assessments will become nothing more than a testing factory. The rich and magical relationship between teacher and student will be reduced to one question: “What can you do to raise this kid’s test scores?” Value Added Assessment fails the most important test: it will create a school system that cannot meet the needs of its children.

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