Class Struggle

[Here is one of our occasional letters from readers and responses from me.]
Dear Extra Credit:

I read your column religiously and have noticed that you have sometimes asked to hear from homeschoolers. After reading your column this morning on the demise of research papers in high schools, I decided to make the leap. See, this is one of the main reasons I am homeschooling (for the first time this year) my two middle-school aged children.

Dan Goldfarb, a 51-year-old history teacher at the Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, says his first encounter with an evaluator under the District’s new IMPACT system for assessing teachers did not go well. Goldfarb does not claim to be an objective observer. He doesn’t like the new system. He doesn’t like how it is being implemented by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.

Here are two lengthy responses to the Monday column on Dan Goldfarb's teacher evaluation, just above this blog post. First are the thoughts of Jason Kamras, the former national teacher of the year who oversees the IMPACT evaluation program for the D.C. Schools. Second is the response from Goldfarb, the subject of the column. I don't usually provide lengthy notes after every column, but in this case I thought they had many more important things to say. The Web gives journalists a chance to help readers go deeper, and I hope we continue to take advantage of it in this way.

I thought rating teachers would be a hot issue, but that was an understatement. Emails and online comments are still popping up on my screen in reaction to the columns I wrote on Nov. 1 and Nov. 8 describing the perils of the District's new teacher evaluation system and the apparent lack of any serious effort towards one in the Washington suburbs. I expect more strenuous comment after next Monday's column, which will explore, for the first time, the secrets of a D.C. teacher's evaluation report.

But in this torrent of interesting feedback on assessing teachers, I have detected rising support among some experts for a radical change of direction that appeals to me.

Today's ed page has a startling story by my colleague Michael Alison Chandler on the rapid spread---and resulting score inflation---of portfolio exams in Virginia. These are collections of classwork of students with learning disabilities or insufficient English. They substitute for the usual state multiple choice tests in assessing those students' progress, and the progress of their school. At one Fairfax County elementary school, Chandler reports, the reading passing rate for English learners has gone from 52 to 94 percent and for special education students 34 to 100 percent in the two years this system has been in place. Sound fishy to you? It does to me, but I think it is going to force some interesting and likely beneficial changes.

[My Local Living section column for Nov. 19, 2009]

Doris Burton taught U.S. history in Prince George’s County for 27 years. She had her students write 3,000-word term papers. She guided them step by step: first an outline, then note cards, a bibliography, a draft and then the final paper. They were graded at each stage.
A typical paper was often little more than what Burton describes as “a regurgitated version of the encyclopedia.” She stopped requiring them for her regular history students and assigned them just to seniors heading for college. The social studies and English departments tried to organize coordinated term paper assignments for all, but state and district course requirements left no room. “As time went by,” Burton said, “even the better seniors’ writing skills deteriorated, and the assignment was frustrating for them to write and torture for me to read.” Before her retirement in 1998, she said, “I dropped the long-paper assignment and went to shorter and shorter and, eventually, no paper at all.”

Go to our education page and check out Freddy Kunkle's great "walking school bus" story about Fairfax County's efforts to save money and get more students to walk or bike to school. He teases grandparents who remember long wintry walks to get their education, but that doesn't include me. The elementary school was a block away, the middle school a half-block and the high school two blocks, all in snow-free California.
I don't think Fairfax is going to be successful in its effort to increase walking, even if it reduces bus service. American parents will drive the kid rather than worry. For a while I lived in probably the safest village in America, Scarsdale, NY. One day, while driving my fourth-grader to school, I saw a rare thing, a 9-year-old riding his bike, his books in the front basket. Then I noticed, right behind him, his mother driving the family Mercedes, making sure he got to school safely. We worry too much, maybe, but if you read the paper, or this Web site, it is hard not to.

Marty Weil is, I think, the only writer left at the Post who has been around longer than I have. He is the polymath hero of our night-side operation, able when necessary to write a story about anything in about three minutes. Here is a message he sent me last night:
"I was excited today to hear an application of ALGEBRA to politics:
in the 23rd congressional district of NY, 3,000 votes now separate the candidates; 10,000 absentee ballots remain to be counted; what percentage does the Conservative/Republican need to overcome the Democrat's lead?
(D plus C) =10,000; (C-D) =3,000 C=6500', so answer is Conservative candidate needs just over 65 pct of absentee ballots to win. Shows how algebra unconsciously figures in daily life."
I am not sure I understand the math, particularly the D + C =10,000, but I learned to trust Marty. At Class Struggle we welcome other examples of algebra affecting our routine existence.

The many bright and energetic people at the U.S. Education Department, who seem just as dedicated as the ones I saw working for the last administration, have a problem. They want to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act so that the federal government can continue to help America's schools, but they need a new name for it. "No Child Left Behind" has worn out its welcome. Assistant secretary Peter Cunningham suggested I ask readers what single word they think is most important to have in the new name. Sounds like a fun exercise. Make your suggestions by posting comments to this blog post. Let's limit it to three suggested words per comment. I will keep a tally to see which is the most popular, and then we can have fun trying to put some of the words together into a new title so inspiring it wlll guarantee big federal dollars for schools for a millenium, or something like that.

The article on whether to cut foreign language instruction in Fairfax County by my colleague Michael Alison Chandler reveals a rarely discussed facet of such classes in America. In many cases they aren't very good. The elementary school versions in particular are often designed more to impress parents than make kids bilingual.