NCTE Literacy Education Updates

Signing Off

2008-06-27T13:57:00.007-05:00

It’s all about finding the center.

I had been on the faculty for around fifteen years, and I had found my comfort level in the classroom. My philosophy had gradually evolved from the rigid authoritarianism of my youth to a more open and accepting stance. I was helped along by some wise community college students who made me see who they were, not who I wanted them to be. Probably the one who pointed me most was an inmate at the state penitentiary—a lifer—who moved me away from promoting education as a way to construct a job, a career, an expected pattern to understanding that the purpose of education is to more fully live and understand the lives we find ourselves in.

It was about this time that I attended a Roger Garrison Master Teachers’ Seminar in Portland, Maine. Garrison had it right. He believed that the voices of authority at the seminar should not be hired consultants who talked the talk, but instead the authoritative voices should be the faculty who have been doing the work. After all, we knew the questions, and we had struggled with answers. Garrison believed that if we had time to work together on our own questions with our own answers, we could find better solutions. What the seminar gave me, in the final analysis, was the personal authority to teach my students, not to teach a field. I came away grounded in my own center.

What happened the first night of the seminar speaks closely to my most recent work. The first event was a social, and we all introduced ourselves by telling a snippet about who/what/why that gave a sense of who we were. A man from the Washington, DC area introduced himself and identified his community college. I don’t remember if it was Prince George’s, Montgomery, or Northern Virginia, but it was one of the recognizable ones from the DC area. He said he liked living close to DC because that is where it’s at. The center of everything. All the political power in the world is right there.

However, I knew that across the Missouri River from Bismarck is a reconstruction of a Mandan Indian Village on its original site. In addition to reconstructed earth lodges, in the center of the village is a wood palisade about 6-8 feet in diameter. Inside that palisade is a hole in the ground, and that is the Arc of the First Man; the hole through which humans emerged unto the earth. There is the center of the universe—the center of everything.

It is the balance between a natural center and our constructed centers that we must achieve. In many ways that is the heart and soul of writing, and what gives such power to the fictive voice. We must find a way to construct a narrative that reveals the unconstructed whole.

Three years ago I traveled east in my little Jeep, and when I came through the eastern divide in the West Virginia, western Maryland and western Virginia mountainscape, I listened to Judy Collins “Amazing Grace.” I began the long slide down the Chesapeake watershed to Washington, the place where it’s at, and when I hit the beltway, I shoved the Chicago Brass into the tape player and cranked the volume. I needed all the brass I could muster to survive.

These kids from the high plains of the western Dakotas survived nicely. Accustomed to the long landscape and the long wind that sweeps down from the western divide and across the great plains, we adjusted to the haze-shortened vision and crowded landscape where large buildings hold the imagination of the world. We reveled in the constructed reality within the art museums, the Kennedy center performances, the words and ideas of our political heritage, the artifacts of the natural science museum and the constructed birds in the air and space museum. Here, everything is one step or more from reality. Artifacts in museums and constructed ideologies reflect and represent the actuality that is the real workaday world.

I have cleaned out my office, the accumulated detritus easily disposed of. I have packed my apartment and it waits for the van. On Monday I will do the ceremonial turning in of my keys, cell phone, credit cards, and other paraphernalia necessary for this work. Then I will toss my bedroll (okay, that’s a metaphor) in the back of my little Jeep, shove Peter, Paul, and Mary singing "This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land" into the tape deck, and climb out of the lowlands and over the eastern divide to head out for the original Northwest Territories. When I come out of the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul heading north on Interstate 35, the traffic will be traveling at 75-90 miles an hour—not unlike the beltway down here. Then, at Forest Lake, I will turn off the interstate onto a two-lane blacktop country road that winds over hills, around lakes, and has no passing areas. The speed limit is 55, and I will fall in line with traffic that moves no faster than that. So, I will meander along the curves and hills, watch the blue sky over the blue lakes, roll the window down and smell the fresh fields and hear the birds. And I will be home.

Increased Stipends for NEH Summer Grants

2008-05-05T09:13:00.002-05:00

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced the Summer Stipend awards for 2009. The grants have increased to $6,000, and there is a new method of applying. Regular faculty members must be nominated by their institution, but each institution can nominate up to two faculty members. Adjunct or part-time faculty and independent scholars may apply for the grants without nomination. The deadline for application is October 1, 2008.

It is Advocacy Time

2008-04-14T15:22:00.002-05:00

The period from March through May is the advocacy period for getting voices heard on Capitol Hill. That is because the President issues the budget in February, and Congress hears from consituents in a constant parade across Capitol Hill for the next few months. If you haven't already received your information about NCTE's "Literacy Education" advocacy month, here is the link to our site.

One of the groups we belong to and work with is the National Humanities Alliance which had its Humanities Advocacy Day on March 4. Since then, the National Humanities Alliance has been following the progress of the legislation for humanities programs, and adding more testimony. Here is the latest update from the NHA.

You will notice that they have posted the NCTE advocacy site on their site. This is another example of the work we do with other organizations to continue to have a common voice on issues of common concern. One of the advantages of advocating for multiple issues, whether in the home district office or in Washington, is that your representatives and their aides begin to recognize you as a concerned citizen who represents a common set of values. As we build trust with the offices, we become a more powerful voice.

I guess everything is a writing assignment--message, audience, voice. Did somebody mention rhetoric??

Humanities Update

2008-01-11T14:53:00.000-06:00

We start the new year with Congress in recess, but news from the National Humanities Alliance. Here is the January update from NHA.

The Spellings' Report and Beyond, Conclusion

2007-12-17T13:47:00.000-06:00

Well, there you have it. We have all posted our comments based on our talk at the NCTE Annual Convention. We learned that dialogue is good, that both the Department of Education can learn from us, and we can learn from them.

In the continuation of the Dialogue, there will be a Featured Session at CCCC in New Orleans, April 3-5. It is scheduled for 8.00. a.m. on Friday. Appearing at that session will be Vickie Schray from the Department of Education, and the NCTE/WPA leaders for the NCTE/WPA joint task force that is preparing resources for assessment. Several of the posts in this series have alluded to those documents. So, in addition to Ms. Schray, we will have Howard Tinberg and Linda Adler-Kassner as the co-chairs of the task force. Also, we will have Jeff Andelora and Asao Inoue as the leaders of the resource packet and the white paper on assessment.

In addition to our session, the Department of Education hosted a meeting of many of the disciplinary associations representing the major undergraduate fields this past October. At that meeting, the Department outlined its plan to conduct another summit in March of 2008 followed by regional meetings again next June.

When Margaret Spellings announced the Commission that sparked all this discussion, she said she wanted to start a dialogue to address the needs of higher education. As Duane points out, the needs are there, and we already know them. As John and Anne caution, we do have serious problems, but we need to be careful of strangers offering gifts. Linda reminds us that our field, rhetoric, needs to be central to how we discuss our work, and Shelley shows us how to think about the public-ness of true scholarship. We are part of the dialogue.

Now we would like to hear from you. Do you have questions of us? Or comments you wish to make. Please feel free to use this space to extend our dialogue.

The Spellings' Report and Beyond, VI

2007-12-15T14:13:00.000-06:00

Duane Roen attended the Phoenix summit. As head of Humanities and Arts at Arizona State University, Duane brings the perspective not only of academic work, but also of how that work relates to our many publics. In his piece he reflects on the needs of higher education, whether there had been a Commission Report or not.

Speaker Six
Duane Roen
Arizona State University

The U.S. Department of Education held one of its regional summits in Tempe, Arizona, on June 12, 2007. Before I arrived at the summit, I was skeptical, concerned that the day would be spent listening to the Department of Education’s party line. However, the day proved to be a productive exchange of ideas among people who care about students. Summit participants included legislators, business and community leaders, and educators from Arizona, Nevada, Texas, California, Washington, and New Mexico. The schedule included some presentations by Department of Education staff, as well as conversations that engaged most, if not all, people in the room. The major topics, of course, were accessibility, affordability, and accountability.

It is important to note that Vicky Schray, Senior Advisor at the Department of Education, profusely complimented Paul Bodmer for his efforts to engage NCTE in the national conversations about “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education,” commonly known as The Spellings Report. Paul has obviously worked diligently to make certain that NCTE is at the table. We should be grateful for all his work. Paul’s work should serve as a model for how we can find ways to participate in national conversations about education.

Sara Martinez Tucker, Under Secretary of Education, opened the summit with some of the general concerns about accessibility, affordability, and accountability. For example, 46% of seventeen-year-olds do not have the math skills required for factory floor jobs; thirty-seven million American adults do not have access to higher education because of time, cost, or institutional inflexibility. Noting that it’s important to encourage local ownership for a national agenda, she commented on the need to align the K-12 curriculum with expectations from both higher education and employers. She also mentioned some existing and proposed initiatives for addressing issues such as greater financial aid for students.

Kristin Conklin, Senior Counselor at the Department of Education, led the discussion on accessibility. She provided sobering statistics about the number of Americans who don’t finish high school. She talked about the P-16 commissions in each state, which are chaired or co-chaired by the governor. She suggested—appropriately—that institutions of higher education need to consider the needs of adults who have work and family responsibilities, commitments that make it difficult to take on-campus classes at certain times of the day and week. She emphasized the need for the business community to provide financial and moral support, and to participate in discussions about learning outcomes. My own view is that discussions about learning outcomes should be as inclusive as possible, seeking input from groups such as faculty, administrators, students, alumni, employers, accrediting agencies, professional organizations, and the general public.

Robert Moran, Senior Advisor at the Department of Education, led the discussion on affordability. Although organizations such as NCTE may have less to contribute to the affordability conversation than to the conversations about access and accountability, we need to be aware of the financial needs of students. For example, faculty can be mindful of textbook costs, which are of concern to students, parents, governing boards, and legislators.

Lyle Hillyard, a state legislator from Logan, Utah, offered an elected official’s perspective on many of the topics that surfaced during the day, emphasizing that all stakeholders (students, legislators, universities, employers, the general public) need to take responsibility for enhancing access, affordability, and accountability.

Vicky Schray, Senior Advisor at the Department of Education, ended the day by leading a discussion on accountability, a topic of great interest to NCTE, CCCC, WPA, and many other professional organizations. She noted—appropriately—that policy makers, institutional leaders, and faculty need to work toward greater transparency in assessment. My own view is that we can enhance our credibility substantially if we share our program and institutional assessments widely with stakeholders. Assessment can serve us in many ways if we carefully design it to find out how well we are doing our work with students. Investing much time in teaching is important, but it is more important that we know how much learning results from that teaching.

Even if the Spellings’ Commission had never existed, there still would be great interest in access, accountability, and affordability. These concepts are familiar to anyone who has spent any time visiting Arizona State University, which is focusing much attention on “access,” “impact,” and “excellence.” When we demonstrate that we are concerned about students and their learning, we show our true colors, for our field is filled with teachers who are deeply committed to student success.

The Spellings' Report and Beyond, V

2007-12-14T10:10:00.000-06:00

In this, the fifth in our series, Anne Herrington looks at the major players in the accountability game and raises some serious questions. Here are her comments from our Featured Session at the NCTE Annual Convention November 17.

Speaker Five
Anne Herrington
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Accountability and Assessment of Learning Outcomes

With the others, I want to thank Paul Bodmer for securing invitations for NCTE members at the regional summits that the DOE was holding to follow up on the Commission report. At the Boston meeting, about eight of us from NCTE joined senior administrators from state systems and colleges and universities, heartened that we, too, could represent our views. It was a bit unsettling, though, to meet at the plush corporate offices of EMC and receive a leather valise and handsome pen as welcome gifts.

Some Key Players and Key Words

The U.S. Department of Education (and state governments to varying degrees) is but one of at least three key players in shaping policy and practices regarding accountability. The others are the major testing corporations (ETS, ACT, RAND) and national higher education organizations (National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges [NASULGC], American Association of State Colleges and Universities [AASCU], and the Association of American Colleges and Universities [AAC&U]). We—as individual faculty and disciplinary, professional organizations—are presently positioned as ones impacted by those policies and with lesser power to shape them. This current hierarchy of power makes collective action and advocacy by us through our professional organizations all the more important: NCTE, CCCC, WPA.

The ideology of assessment that drives these policies is evident in the key words that circulate in documents by these key players. These key words figure prominently in the report of the Federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education (the “Spellings Commission”) that formed the basis for the Secretary of Education’s Action Plan and, in turn, shaped the Regional Summit discussions: “robust culture of accountability and transparency,” “value-added,” “allowing meaningful interstate comparison of student learning.” To achieve these goals of accountability, calculation of value-added, and comparability, the report called for higher education to be held accountable for learning outcomes, and cited two tests as examples of quality-assessment instruments: ETS’s Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, (MAPP) and the RAND Corporation’s Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Already the interconnection among key players is evident, here the testing corporations and the federal government.

With this frame in mind, I will make a couple comments on the Regional Summit and then two related initiatives that are impacting assessment and also show the links among the key players.

Boston Regional Summit

At the Boston Regional Summit, Vickie Schray, Senior Advisor to Under Secretary Tucker, led the discussion on Accountability. I was heartened that of the key words, transparency was stressed, not comparability (benchmarking) or value-added calculations. To paraphrase Schray, it’s each institution’s responsibility to define learning outcomes and determine the best means to asses them. She went on to say, “that doesn’t necessarily mean standardized tests.” When asked explicitly about bench-marking, Schray said, “there is no expectation for bench-marking.” She did stress, though, that having external criteria is important. Reflecting at least in part the input of other NCTE voices at the earlier summits, Schray also mentioned having heard a lot about e-portfolios.

Later, in her talk, Secretary Spellings said the Department was “not calling for a one-size fits all manner of accountability.” She also affirmed that decisions as to what and how to assess should be left to institutions.

In an email report to my University’s Provost, I summed up my impressions: “These comments encouraged me as they seem to be backing off expecting institutions to use reductive tests like CLA, CAAP, or MAPP to assess outcomes and compare ourselves against ‘peers’, i.e., other users of one of those tests. While an institution might still choose one of these, of course, it seemed that the option to select context-sensitive, locally developed assessments was opened to us. That’s certainly more in line with recommendation of AAC&U and also, for writing assessment, the National Council of Teachers of English.” (As you may have inferred, in writing to her, I was trying to make a case for our locally developed assessments and position NCTE with AAC&U.)

Voluntary System of Accountability

Unfortunately, that approach to assessment is not in line with the one taken by NASULGC and AASCU, which over the past year had been developing its “Voluntary System of Accountability,” an effort to develop a template to provide potential students and parents with comparable, and easily accessible, information on basic cost and demographic information, graduation rates, time to degree, and, what is more controversial, learning outcomes. For learning outcomes, they identified three tests that participating institutions could select from for the measurement: ETS’s Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP), RAND’s Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and ACT’s Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP)--three standardized tests. The rationale for this outcomes testing provision has essentially been that “if we don’t do it, the feds or someone else with do it for us.” Peter McPherson, President of NASULGC, argues, “If we can’t figure out how to measure ourselves, someone else will figure out how to measure us,” he said. “It’s inevitable.” How adopting these three standardized tests represents higher education “figuring it out” for ourselves is hard to understand. It seems instead to be higher education using what someone else, the testing industry, has figured out.

The template, called the College Portrait, was officially unveiled in early November at the NASULGC annual conference. According to an article in Insidehighered.com (Jaschik), participating institutions already include the California State University, University of North Carolina and University of Wisconsin systems, as well as the Universities of Iowa and Tennessee. Interestingly, not the University of California system. While praising other aspects of the College Portrait, Robert C. Dynes, President of the University of California, questioned the value of the outcomes testing provision: “The university has concluded that using standardized tests on an institutional level as measures of student learning fails to recognize the diversity, breadth, and depth of discipline-specific knowledge and learning that takes place in colleges and universities today.”

DOE FIPSE Funded projects : The Postsecondary Achievement and Institutional Performance Pilot Program

As one way to push forward with assessment, the Department of Education dedicated $2.45 million of FIPSE grant money to assess existing measures of learning outcomes and develop new ones. As reported by Lederman in Insidehighered.com, the three projects involve the major higher education organizations and one or possibly two involve the major testing corporations:

NASULGC receives funds to review the effectiveness of CLA, MAPP, and CAAP. And incredibly, according to Insidehighered.com, the testing companies themselves will work with other testing “experts” to assess the tests reliability and validity. Like trusting a drug-company to research its own drugs.
AASCU’s part of the project (in which AAC&U will also participate) focuses on developing tools for measuring student outcomes in new areas, including “civic engagement, teamwork, personal and social responsibility.” Stay tuned for more testing! I do not know if the testing companies will be involved with this project, but it would not surprise me if they were. AASCU has been advocating value added assessment and use of “recognized and tested national instruments” for quite awhile. Also, in a “webi-nar” I participated in with CLA, the CLA leader said that they are working on developing an assessment of ethics.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities is leading a project to conduct an audit of campus-based assessment projects to identify best practices, with e-portfolios being a focus (http://www.aacu.org/value/index.cfm). Kathi Yancey is on the Advisory Board of this project, a promising sign.

So where does this leave us? Advocacy, action, and research:

As individuals, we need to engage in advocacy and action at our local institutions and with our professional organizations. We should be guided by NCTE and CCCC positions—ones also in line with AAC&U I might add--calling for locally based assessments that are closely linked to curricula and derive from locally identified objectives; assessments that use multiple measures; assessments that engage students in contextualized, meaningful writing.

The WPA and NCTE Resource Guide will also be a valuable tool for us. Participate in NCTE’s Advocacy Month this April, too (http://www.ncte.org/portal/30_view.asp?id=115893).
As an organization, we need to keep trying to impact the U.S. DOE and our states.

We also need to find ways as an organization to be in conversations with the major higher education organizations, certainly to follow the FIPSE projects. Will writing assessment experts be involved in NASULGC’s review of CLA, MAPP, and CAAP, for instance? And in AASCU’s project?

We need to pursue systematic research on the formulation and implementation of “accountability” policies, trying to hold accountability accountable. That research would include examination of the interrelation among key players and the ideologies driving present policies.

We also need to get some questions on the table that the accountability and comparability frame obscures:

How much and what sorts of assessment do we—including institutions and public stakeholders—need beyond what occurs in classrooms? This is a key question for faculty to address at the institutional level and to be brought into policy discussions within higher education associations and DOE.
How important is having comparability of data with other institutions? Is transparency enough?
Who and what should drive curriculum decisions?
Where are the dollars going? If you’re paying attention, you’ll see that a good deal of money is flowing to the testing industry. At our own institutions, if money is being spent for standardized tests, is any also going for locally developed and implemented assessments?
What is the investment in assessment in relation to other academic needs? And, how are costs and benefits of assessment to be assessed?

References:
Jaschik, Scott. “Accountability System Launched.” November 12, 2007. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/12/nasulgc

Lederman, Doug. “Meeting of the Minds.” September 27, 2007. http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/27/fipse.

“U.S. Department of Education Awards $2.45 Million for Improved Measures of Achievement for Post-Secondary Students.” http://www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2007/09/09282007.html.

The Spellings' Report and Beyond, IV

2007-12-12T14:11:00.000-06:00

Shelley Rodrigo went to the Phoenix summit, participated in our featured session, and came away from the experience with a new take on the scholarship of teaching and learning that also speaks to Boyer's scholarship of engagement. In this piece she explores why going public is now part of our everyday, workaday world.

Speaker IV
Shelley Rodrigo
Mesa Community College
Disciplinary Representation & Professional Responsibilities

As was already mentioned a couple of times by the time I spoke, the summer meetings were primarily made up of high level administrators, regional business, industry, and public officials, as well as individuals from educational industries, especially testing services. If these individuals had ever been in a classroom, it had been a very long time since they had seen the inside of one. At the Phoenix meeting, where I attended, the only people in the room who were still teaching classes where the individuals who had been invited at the suggestion of NCTE. As English instructors, especially of universally required first year composition, many of us regularly work with a representative cross-section of students at our institutions. Not only should we be thankful to Paul Bodmer and NCTE for getting us invited to participate in these discussions, the Department of Education should be thankful to Paul and NCTE for getting actual faculty, who have the closest connect to actual students, participating in these discussions.

During the various discussions of access, affordability, and accountability the faculty representatives were the ones who were able to give detailed examples and anecdotes to help elaborate or sometimes complicate the issues. To put this in terms of Linda Adler-Kassner's discussion of framing, it was the faculty lead discussion of specifics that allowed for the expansion, reinterpretation, and even breaking of the frames that the various high level administrators, business persons, and politicians used to make meaning of the issues.

Participating in these discussions helped me to realize that there is a shift in what it will take to be a faculty member in the 21st century. This shift in faculty roles parallels the description of the different types of teaching that Shulman (2000) discusses in his definition of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). We are all Good teachers, critically reflecting on our teaching practices and revising as necessary. Most of us take pride in being Scholarly teachers, teachers who base our teaching practices on the sound pedagogical practices based on the research and theories we read in scholarship. While faculty who practice SoTL research their own practices and take the big step of making that research public so that others can benefit from what they have learned.

Teachers in the 21st century, especially English teachers responsible for making sure Johnny can write, need to make similar distinctions about their scholarly service, especially going public. Good service includes participating at the institution and in the discipline. Scholarly service, however, requires going public. And what we've learned from participating in the regional summits is that going public in scholarly service includes the need to be political. Participating in the political discussions that affect decision making about educational practices and policies is crucial. Going public also includes being transparent, inviting administrators, business persons, and politicians into our classrooms so they see what is going on. To be a faculty member doing scholarly service in the 21st century means to go public, the former "private" classroom is now political.

Finally, to help faculty make this step from good service to scholarly service, we need institutions like NCTE, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), and the Association of American Colleges and University (AAC&U) promoting a scholarship of political service. For example, both the NCTE and AAC&U have developed robust public outreach elements that help to change how the press represents English studies and higher education respectively. This is critically important and individual faculty members need to know about these resources so they can refer to them; however, promoting a scholarship of political service would be more like what the WPA is starting to do with their Network for Media Action. The WPA's Network for Media Action is asking individuals to participate. The group also occasionally provides literature and workshops to help individuals do political service. A scholarship of political service would help individual faculty members figure out how to fit political service into their already busy schedules, what to do, and what to say to start facilitating positive change at a local level. Not many of us signed up to be teachers thinking advocacy would be a regular part of our job; however, being a faculty member in the 21st century now demands it. Reference:

Shulman, Lee. (2000). From Minsk to Pinsk: Why a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 1(1), 48-53. Retrieved October 30, 2007, from http://www.iupui.edu/~josotl/VOL_1/NO_1/SHULMAN.PDF.

The Spellings' Report and Beyond, III

2007-12-11T14:04:00.000-06:00

This is the third in our series on the NCTE Annual Convention Featured Session on the Spellings' Commission report, "A Test of Leadership." In this piece, John Webster talks about his conflicted feelings when he attended the summit, and the continual conflict as he thinks about how we talk and act about access for all our students.

Speaker Three
John Webster
University of Washington
Access and the Seattle DOE Summit

When people have asked me what I was to talk about at this session I have kept having to begin by describing a certain precariousness in my own position. On the one hand I—like many, I think—am suspicious of any Department of Education initiative that would use No-Child-Left-Behind-linked rhetoric to force change in postsecondary education. On the other hand, I’ve also watched as big research universities like my own have more or less effortlessly ignored much of the last two decades’ worth of pressure towards promoting more fully learning-based teaching. To the extent the threat of government action can bring better support for teaching and learning, I’m all for it.

So I arrived at the Seattle Summit with mixed feelings of reserve and enthusiasm. I left with what was probably a little less reserve, and the biggest reason was the hour our summit spent on Access. For to my surprise, these 60 minutes produced something of a love-in, as the whole room, DOE and postsecondary people alike, expressed enthusiastic agreement on the need to expand our efforts to bring non-traditional and underrepresented students into higher ed. Many people spoke in this hour. Some described extraordinary recruitment efforts to bring potential students and even their parents to campus; others described specially designed transition courses and elaborate scholarship and tutorial programs to boost retention.

But lurking at the edges of this conversation were two issues that kept my suspicious self from too-full an embrace of this magic moment. First was the DOE notion that much of the problem with Access was of someone else’s making—specifically, the public high schools; second was an underlying contradiction between the embracing of all the programs people described in this hour on one hand and the implications of the rhetoric of “remediation” on the other.

For the first, the report is quite clear. The public schools are failing in their proper job. That job? “Establish[ing] rigorous graduation requirements and course work” based on “college and work-ready standards.” To be sure, the report also contains language about both states’ and higher education’s responsibility to work with high schools to clarify what “college-ready” standards might be, and they make recommendations for better need-based financial aid as well.

But it’s disturbing that the negative frame of NCLB dominates the report’s analysis. Like a lot of No Child Left Behind talk, the report’s language is top down and over-simple—and finally deeply unrealistic. One of conservatism’s voices is relentlessly and rationally pragmatic: define the problem, analyze solutions, create an action plan. This report uses just that voice, and from a certain distance, it all seems ironclad. But when you actually get nearer the problem you see how many contextual factors have been ignored, and here, I felt, was an example of just exactly that. One hopes that one effect of NCTE’s attention to the commission’s work will be a better understanding of this issue’s complexity.

For the second issue, I felt our conversation too easily passed over the way the access programs people described here represented a remarkable conceptual change over our practice of 20 or more years ago. For once upon a time all of these efforts could have been labeled “remediation”—programs undertaken to address holes in students’ preparations, and therefore not worthy of college credit, often, even, offered only at extra expense to the students involved. (Indeed, at my university this is still our model for English as a Second Language students.)

Yet little of the conversation at our meeting credited the way our new programs tend to replace, not just complement, remediation’s deficit model. For most higher ed people no longer look at these students as liabilities to our institutions; rather we believe that it is very much in our interest to engage them in order that our entire student body can benefit from the extraordinary diversity they bring.

But while our Summit conversation included talk about this conceptual shift, the Spellings Commission’s base-line rhetoric very clearly does not. For they like to cite the statistic (repeated by DOE personnel at our meeting) that 40% of all first-year students need some form of remediation at a cost to taxpayers of one billion dollars a year—a scarily expensive thought, and all, one is left to infer, avoidable if high schools just did a better job of preparation. But rightly understood much of this expense might better be seen as a wise investment in precisely the goals DOE would urge us to embrace (better acceptance and graduation rates for underrepresented student groups) than as a wasteful diversion of scarce resources.

Because I think neither of these two issues trivial, I left the summit only slightly less conflicted than when I arrived. As positive as our Access hour was, even in its enthusiasm there was evidence of much more clarification to be sought and much more work to be done.

The Spellings' Report and Beyond, II

2007-12-10T10:15:00.000-06:00

This is the second in a series of reports on the 2007 NCTE Annual Convention featured session, "The Future of Higher Education: Responses, Reactions, and Recommendations from the Secretary of Education's Action Plan." In this report Linda Adler-Kassner frames all our discussions with a commentary on frames, and how we need to approach our work.

Speaker Two
Linda Adler-Kassner
Eastern Michigan University
What’s in a Frame?: Policy Reports and Higher Education circa 2007

Whether we use the term or not, we all know the theoretical construct known as “framing.” Frames are ideological boundaries that form the outlines for interpretations of meaning. They shape what “makes sense,” what is in fact “commonsensical,” and what is not. When President Bush repeatedly invoked 9/11 during the 2004 Republican National Convention, he was using that event to establish a frame that linked Republican stances on everything from national security to healthcare to the September 11 attacks. More to the point, when Undersecretary of Higher Education Sarah Martinez Tucker used the metaphor of a train wreck to describe American higher education, she was using that image to frame our work.

The principles reflected through frames are shared, do persist, because they are incorporated in and perpetuated by stories. The more often the stories that extend from frames are told, the more they reinforce the frame that shapes them. Ultimately, individual stories become linked parts of a larger narrative that comes to be taken as ‘commonsensical,’ the way that things are, because they exist within and are linked by a very tight frame.

"A Test of Leadership" tells a story about American (higher) education through a very tight frame that is repeated in a number of related policy reports. The power of this frame comes, in part, from its invocation of an enormously powerful story deeply embedded in American culture. In this narrative, America is always progressing toward the achievement of a virtuous democracy. Obstacles to that progress, known as declensions, constantly arise. But these obstacles are also crucial for the nation’s progress, because they force Americans to put their heads together and develop methods, systems, and strategies to overcome the problems. No progress without struggle, as the saying goes – and this mantra extends directly from this powerful story. The challenges to progress compel citizens to demonstrate their ingenuity and commitment to democracy; in doing so, they further the democracy beyond where it might have been otherwise.

This narrative of overcoming struggle to achieve progress has been especially powerful for teachers, especially as the system of American education developed through the 20th century. Through it, education and educators have been charged with cultivating in students the critical intelligences necessary to analyze situations, identify problems, and develop processes and methodologies through which these problems can be overcome. This story about the purpose of education is so ingrained, in fact, that it literally constitutes the air that we breathe. We often say that our jobs as teachers are to prepare students for participation in democracy. As writing teachers, we say that our work is central to this participation because we focus specifically on the role of language in this process. We might say, for instance, that we help students learn to use language to develop and express their ideas so that they might contribute to the democracy as critically literate citizens.

This narrative and the frame from which it extends also forms the backbone of the Spellings' Commission Report, "A Test of Leadership." The report says that the purpose of education is to prepare students for democracy by cultivating their critical intelligences. But it says that teachers and schools are failing in this purpose because they no longer understand the nature of the democracy. To illustrate, I’ll read two paragraphs from the Report. Before these paragraphs, the report has established a declension taking place within higher education because today, “too many Americans just aren’t getting the education that they need – and that they deserve” (Miller vii). Following the establishment of this internal declension, two paragraphs signal the application of principles emanating from the jeremiad. The first anchors the report squarely in the jeremiad’s narrative:

To reach these objectives, we believe that U.S. higher education institutions must recommit themselves to their core public purposes. For close to a century now, access to higher education has been a principle – some would say the principle –means of achieving social mobility. Much of our nation’s inventiveness has been centered in colleges and universities, as has our commitment to a kind of democracy that only an educated and informed citizenry makes possible. (ix)

The key words here– core public purposes, access to higher education, achieve[ment] of social mobility, commitment to … democracy, educated and informed citizenry – all emphasize that achievement of a virtuous democracy relies upon the development of critical intelligence through education.

But the next paragraph indicates that the educational system itself has fallen into declensionposes an obstacle to the achievement of the democracy because it is no longer cultivating appropriate intelligences. It further intimates that educators, experts charged with the authority to direct this cultivation, no longer understand the nature of the virtuous democracy. It reads:

But today that world is becoming tougher, more competitive, less forgiving of wasted resources and squandered opportunities. In tomorrow’s world a nation’s wealth will derive from its capacity to educate, attract, and retain citizens who are able to work smarter and learn faster – making educational achievement ever more important both for individuals and society writ large. (ix)

Today, this paragraph says, the world is different, and teachers just don’t get it.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the authority for overseeing education and making sure that students are being trained to participate as citizens in the democracy has rested primarily with the federal government. Within this frame, then, it is still the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that this training is taking place. That’s why, in the frame surrounding the Spellings Report, it is necessary for other entities who do get it – the federal government in the persona of the Education Department, or other sanctioned partners – to step in.

But we need to be very careful about how we read these documents and the information emanating from them. Even a quick examination leads to a potentially disturbing revelation: they’re saying the same thing that we teachers often do about the purpose of education, and they’re drawing on the same story about America’s progress through struggle that we are. In other words, we wind up in a conundrum: the frame that we might use to argue against the charges in the Spellings Report and policy documents like it, that is, the story that says that
the purpose of education is to prepare students for participation in democracy, is exactly the frame that is being used in the Report to argue against teachers’ authority and expertise. The difference is that these reports say that teachers no longer understand what that democracy is, can no longer can no longer teach to it, and thus require intervention from outside.

The question is how we should respond. In considering that issue, I find it helpful to keep in mind one of George Lakoff’s maxims: when you negate a frame, you reinforce the frame. It’s no good to say, “They’re wrong! Teachers really do understand the nature of 21st century democracy.” We also can’t just rely on critique, like the critique of "A Test of Leadership" and related documents of the sort I’m discussing here. We MUST quickly move beyond critique and develop strategies to address important questions currently circulating about education, such as “What are students learning, why are they learning it, and how do we know it?” We need to situate the responses we issue and the actions that we take within our values, our principles. We need to think about what we do want and can do. We also need to acknowledge that these solutions will be all the more complicated because, in many respects, we do share the same frame as that surrounding the Spellings report. Imagine arguing that the purpose of education isn’t to prepare students for participation in the 21st century democracy, for instance. What, then, is it? The broader question, instead, is who gets to define “democracy”, and who should shape how students are prepared for it. We need to be prepared to present our own evidence-based conceptions of what we mean.

NCTE and The Council of Writing Program Administrators are currently involved in one effort to propose a response to this conundrum, the creation of a resource guide for program administrators and writing instructors to develop valid, reliable, and appropriate assessments. This is but one effort, though, and I hope we’ll continue to talk about other possibilities through this session and afterward.

Accreditation, Accountability, and Control

2007-12-10T07:58:00.000-06:00

Many of us were surprised last month when the U.S. House Committee stripped language from its version of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act that would have given final authority for institutional student outcomes to the institutions. What some of us suspected seems to be confirmed in this Chronicle of Higher Education's story. The language in the House version would have given final and full authority for establishing student learning outcomes to the institution. The accrediting agencies, and in particular the program accreditors, wanted some say in student learning outcomes. Stripping the language gives time to the accrediting agencies and the institutions to work out a compromise so that the language in the law does not become too restrictive to either side.

The Spellings' Report and Beyond, I

2007-12-07T11:07:00.000-06:00

Paul Bodmer

At the 2007 NCTE Annual Convention in New York, we had a featured session focusing on some of the potential actions stemming from the Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education. To gather information to address the report's recommendations, the Department of Education convened a series of regional summits to focus on the issues of accessibility, affordability, and accountability for higher education. The regional summits were attended by institutional representatives, including faculty, and we had representatives at all the summits. Our convention session was composed of me (Atlanta summit), Linda Adler-Kassner of Eastern Michigan University (Kansas City summit), Anne Herrington of University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Boston summit), John Webster of the University of Washington (Seattle summit), Duane Roen of Arizona State University (Phoenix summit), and Shelley Rodrigo of Mesa Community College (Phoenix summit).

To extend our conversation, we decided to use my blog space to send out our comments. I will start with an overview, and then the others' pieces will follow in the next few days. Of course, we invite commentary.

Speaker One
Paul Bodmer
National Council of Teachers of English
How We Got Here

How did the greatest system of higher education, one that educated more of its own citizens, and more of the world’s citizens than any other, all of a sudden find itself under attack, with a Commission appointed to find out what is wrong, and the undersecretary of Education declaring that we were headed for a “trainwreck”? How did we get here?

Throughout the last decade or more, there has been a growing public perception, at least in the think-tank and policy world, that something was amiss. This was fueled by the publication of various reports starting with “A Nation at Risk” through “The Gathering Storm,” as well as recent studies that claimed students’ literacy and numeracy skills were no better, and perhaps worse, at the end of a college education than they had been at the beginning. In addition, the cost of attending college was rising faster than other costs. To be frank, we in the higher education community did not do much to dispel some of those assumptions and fears. With that, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings established a commission to initiate a dialogue about costs, quality, and access to higher education.

That report, “A Test of Leadership,” was issued just over a year ago. The report identified problems in affordability, accountability, access, and quality. Secretary Spellings issued an action plan that would address the issues through three initiatives, affordability, access, and accountability.

Affordability is being addressed through a streamlining of the financial aid application process and Congressional action to increase funding for financial aid. In addition, institutions are being asked to control cost increases, and as we speak the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act has language dropped in and pulled out that punishes or rewards colleges for cost curtailment.

Academic accessibility needs to be addressed through the states as they are the ones who control state high school graduation standards. But, the Department of Education is very impressed with ACHIEVE and the American Diploma Project. Accountability, however, is much closer to us, as that is being addressed through accreditation, and that affects each of our institutions.

To address accountability, the Department of Education convened a forum a year ago this month to address the issue. The attendees were higher education officials and consultants from across the country. In their public conversation, they began talking about establishing outcomes. I suggested to the Department of Education person in charge, Vickie Schray, that outcomes needed to be articulated through the disciplines and institutions that actually deliver the education. She agreed, and asked for names for regional summits held last June attended by institutional people. We provided names, and we had an average of five of our members at each of the regional summits.

Our attendees at the summit were able to speak frankly with the other attendees and with the representatives from the Department of Education. What follows are the comments from the attendees, reflecting their observations and reflections on the meetings. In the next few days, in this space, you will see comments from Linda Adler-Kassner, Anne Herrington, Duane Roen, Shelley Rodrigo, and John Webster, not necessarily in that order.

Is NCLB ever going to be reauthorized?!

2007-10-26T11:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I received a call from an NCTE member in Colorado who asked,"Is NCLB going to be reauthorized soon? Will it ever be reauthorized?" I understand that member's puzzlement. Each day in Washington, a pronouncement about a probable schedule for voting is heard in the Capitol, in the newspaper, or on the air.

For example, in the middle of October Senators Kennedy and Reid issued language for portions of a possible NCLB bill; they continue to hope for action on a full bill by the end of the year. Since earlier in the summer in the House a full bill draft has been circulating, with a range of responses from enthusiastic endorsement by a number of legislators to President Bush's October 15 statement that he will veto any bill that "weakens" NCLB, including any changes in accountability measures like those in the House bill.

NCTE is keeping close tabs on almost daily statements from legislators, associations, and other groups that have definite stands on what needs to be changed in NCLB. Our organization's own latest action has been to write joint letters with four other subject area associations to both the House and the Senate committees responsible for NCLB to advocate for increased support within the bill for professional development for teachers. Encouraging news is that more and more legislators are talking in public forums about their understanding that teachers are the most important asset in our schools and, therefore, deserve support through professional development.

NCTE members have been wonderfully proactive in sending letters to their legislators when prompted by a call from NCTE or on their own initiative. These letters matter. They matter a great deal right now when legislators need data and experiences from classrooms, districts, and states as they sort out all the calls for changes in NCLB. When NCTE suggests or when you have ideas to share, please continue to write or to visit your legislators. They need to hear the voices of those professionals who count most, teachers who act on behalf of promoting their students' learning.

Individuals and Types

2007-08-16T09:11:00.000-05:00

“Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”). In spite of our recognition that Fitzgerald is right, we continue to work from the general back to the specific, which is why we so often have misquided policy. If we pay attention to a new report from the Department of Education, there is a chance that this time we might see that community colleges are different--not just from the rest of academe, but from each other.

The report, titled "Differential Characteristics of Post-Secondary 2-Year Institutions," establishes seven categories of two-year colleges; small, medium, and large publics, allied health non-for-profits, other not-for-profits, degree-granting for-profits, and other for-profits." This is a start, and it begins to give us good information on who attends what category of two-year college, what the faculty cohort looks like in very general terms, and what kinds of completion (or non-completion) experience students have. Maybe this beginning categorization will help us see that we need to step back to look at what an education ought to provide, how it ought to provide it, and how we need to educate all our publics about the purpose, value, and significance of post-secondary education.

Of course, I could make the same argument for Post-Secondary 4-Year Institutions as well as for all of higher education. The Commission on the Future of Higher Education's report last year highlighted that. It treated all of higher education as the type. So those of us who understand our individual institutions could easily say, "Doesn't really apply to me." And that is why the call for some easy method of comparability must be answered with our knowledge that we are not all of a type, but that our differences are good.

That also means that we in the academy must educate ourselves to our individual institutions, and work with our colleagues at their individually different institutions, to find the underlying principles and values that should be established as comparable educational benefits. Then we can show that not all post-secondary educations are the same, nor that they ought to be the same. Students should attend the institution(s) based upon what they see as their educational needs. But first we have to clearly identify and articulate those various outcomes, needs, and values and correspond them to the individual institutions.

The Dog Days

2007-07-31T15:10:00.000-05:00

It's that time again, "the Dog Days of Summer." I don't know where that phrase came from, but I remember it from my childhood as a way to describe the long, languishing, hot days when dogs would lie on their backs in the middle of the lawn and doze away the day. Otherwise known as August. In the capitol city we are anticipating the hiatus that will come when Congress finally succumbs to the pressure to get out of town with work either done, partly done, or undone. The city will languish and those of us still here will dress down and saunter to work. So, as we approach the lax month, where are we?

Its hard to say where we are, as most of the key legislation for education has moved forward in one body of Congress, but not in the other. For instance, the House is busy moving forward on ther reauthorization of NCLB, but the Senate has yet to act. The Senate has passed its version of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, but the House has yet to act. In the Senate version there is more money for students in the financial aid package, and there is a clarification of accrediation rules. On the latter, institutions are responsible for establishing what student success looks like in relation to their mission, and the accrediting agencies need to monitor that. Also, the institutions must be clear about their policies for transfer of credit from other institutions. The heavy hand of control has been reduced to the appropriate role of oversight. While this looks good, we need to wait to see what the House does.

The pressure, of course, is to try to get both the major pieces of education legislation, reauthorization of NCLB and HEA, passed before the end of the Congressional year. Much good work has gone into the reauthorization process, but if it is not passed and becomes law, we will have another continuing resolution, which leaves the old law in place.

The same is true for funding humanities issues. The House has passed its version with an increase for NEH and funding for Archives and Public Records. The Senate HELP committee has passed increased funding, but the full Senate has not voted, yet. Here is the full update from the National Humanities Alliance.

The good news is that both bodies are working to move legislation forward, and they feel the heat of summer's breath on their necks. With that, we hope the dog days of summer will provide the respite and lassitude to prepare us for the needed burst of energy to make the fall productive.

Our Voice Has Been Heard

2007-07-31T09:37:00.000-05:00

"Serious changes" in NCLB must be made before House education committee chairperson George Miller (D-Calif.) will bring the law to the floor for renewal. For example, based on constituent input (including that from NCTE members), Miller insists that multiple measures must be allowed to assess student achievement fairly. Although Republicans like Buck McKeon (Calif) say that attempts to, in his words, "weaken the law" will draw Republican resistance, Miller said in a presentation yesterday that he expects that the House will vote in September on legislation to renew the law and that changes will be included.

With a September vote or not, NCTE member letters to their legislators can be influential in advocating for changes that support student learning. NCTE's recent call for letter writing was highly generative, and second contacts by those writers or first contacts for those who didn't get to write before are still quite important. As shown by Miller's adamant stand about multiple measures, legislators do pay attention.

Campus Accountability; Or, Assessment for "Them"

2007-06-26T13:16:00.000-05:00

When the Commission on the Future of Higher Education's report, "A Test of Leadership," called for accountability, they were suggesting the idea that institutional success ought to be easily compared to other institutions--you could then "buy" an education, kind of like buying a car. Of course I am oversimplifying, but oversimplification is what the report did as well.

Assessment has always been a central part of education, but it has most often been the formative kind of assessment that we used in the classrooms and offices to see how we were doing, where we were slipping, and figure out how we could do better. That kind of assessment, however, seldom tells others how good our stuff is. And that telling others is both what the Commission called for, and what the Department of Education is striving for.

In the meantime, the two big public institution organizations, NASULGC and AASCU, have banded together to offer a voluntary program for their institutions to use. It works like this. Using a template devised by NASULGC and AASCU, institutions will post information on the web that allows parents and students to figure out cost, program availability, graduation rates, enrollment continuance, value-added learning outcomes (through CLA, MAPP, CAAP--all national tests that measure aspects of critical and broad-based thinking), engagement levels (through the NSSE family of assessments) and other bits and pieces of information to allow prospective students and their funders to see what they will get.

This is a step for transparency. If it stops here, it will do more harm than good, as it will begin to be reductive, and we will learn how to use this data for all the wrong purposes. What we need to do is continue to find more and better methods and processes to assess student growth and learning in our courses and across our courses and institutions. We must clearly indicate what is good formative work and what is good summative work. And we must articulate very clearly when those two kinds of assessment come together to give us a more complete picture. We must interpret the data.

Here is what I mean. I do believe that data ought to drive decisions, but, too often, raw data is incomplete. I have gone from drinking caffeinated coffee to drinking non-caf tea, to non-caf coffee, and now I am happily back on the drug. All because of the reports of the effects of caffeine on my system. What we need to remember is that all assessments give us information. The next step is to take all that information from as many assessments as possible and build an interpretation that is clear, articulate, meaningful, and trusted.

Otherwise, the assessment tool will drive the system, rather than the assessment tool informing the interpretations which will drive the system. When I go to my doctor, and he says that my last blood test showed something that he isn't sure about, but he would like me to take more tests, I comply. At our next visit, he tells me that he read the results, talked to so-and-so who is a specialist in this, and their conclusion is that maybe we should think about modifying my prescriptions. I feel good that he is using multiple assessments to gather data, and that he and his colleagues are using their best professional judgement to interpret that data, and that the interpretation may be different when we have more sophisticated tests. That is good assessment.

Good assessment begins with multiple tools, provides trustworthy data, ensures consistency, and is interpreted by professionally competent and knowledgeable people.

Updates from NEH and ACLS

2007-06-07T13:23:00.001-05:00

The National Humanities Alliance has just issued its June update. Several of the issues that are on the advocacy platform of the NHA and were presented to Congressional offices during Humanities Advocacy Day in March have moved forward, notably increases in funding for NHA and for the National Historical Public Records Commission.

The American Council of Learned Societies held its first meeting outside the U.S. when it met in Montreal, Canada May 10-12, 2007. The theme of the conference was "The Global Academy and the Geography of Ideas." The program highlights will be published on the ACLS site later this summer.

The Learning of the Teaching of Writing

2007-06-06T10:02:00.000-05:00

I had mixed reactions to an article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education. It is a reflection by a developmental writing teacher on the power of the personal essay. In her article, she describes her discovery of how writing from personal experience allowed her developmental students, and ultimately herself as a graduate student, to find the voice that gave power to analytical essays. I had a good news/bad news sort of reaction.

It is good news because, appearing in CHE, it speaks across the academy to articulate the position many of us find ourselves in when non-composition academics rail against the kinds of assignments we use rather than the assignments they think we should use. The author of the article describes how she moved from the position of most of the academy--that students should only write academic essays on the great issues of all time--to the position she should have as a writing teacher--that developing and nurturing authentic writers' voices is the essential beginning for students to write convincing academic arguments.

Of course, most of us have known that since the 1970's when composition studies demonstrated the powerful effect of starting with the personal. And that is the rub, so to speak. How could someone be hired to teach writing when they had not had any courses in composition that would have prepared them? I know, dumb question. The problem is that we are still hiring unprepared people to teach writing because "anyone can teach writing."

And that is the bad news. The Conference on College Composition and Communication has advocated since 1982 that we need to have properly prepared writing teachers. However, as I discovered on my own campus, administrators and other faculty do not accept that position. One of the problems is the incorrect assumption that subject-knowledge automatically embues teacher-knowledge. We know it doesn't, and yet the position of most pundits is that subject matter is the primary concern. In the recent Time magazine article, "How to Fix No Child Left Behind," the reference to teachers is one line about ensuring subject matter knowledge. In a recent American Enterprise Institute panel discussion on the question of whether the American Competitiveness Initiative was in collaboration or competition with NCLB, the point was made that we needed to incentivise teachers who knew their material to get them into under performing schools. No mention was made of developing and nurturing teacher knowledge.

While there are occasional comments about the need to pay attention to learning theory, the major cry is still for ensuring that teachers, including highly qualified teachers, need to only know the content; after all, anybody can teach. Very little is said about teacher knowledge, growth of teacherly skills and attitudes, and the professionalization of our profession. Had the author of the CHE article above been required to show that she, first, had taken the appropriate coursework in teaching composition, and second, had been involved in a program where she could demonstrate that she could apply composition theory in her teaching, she would not have had to learn, through her students' expense, that good, strong writing starts with the development of the writer's voice.

I am glad the author has learned it. I am glad she wrote about it. I hope she joins us in insisting that qualified teachers not only have solid knowledge of their field, but they also have solid backgrounds in the theory and practice of teaching their field.

A New Media Literacy

2007-05-15T18:35:00.000-05:00

Media literacy is becoming complex. We've gone from analyzing television and film for stereotyped images, to evaluating internet sources for validity and reliability, to youth media production. Youtube further blurs boundaries between news and information on the one hand, and entertainment on the other by allowing the highly personal, to the highly produced to share meta tags and subsequent placement on search menus.

What about critical analysis of images from surveillance cameras? Televisual images from these cameras are on the rise in public and commercial spaces. We are mostly familiar with cameras at stoplights, in train stations and grocery stores or banks. Casinos across the country have surveillance cameras with digital data banks of faces and face-recognition software. Who programs, positions and analyzes this material? That once-famous camcorder image of Rodney King in Los Angeles, and the other, a bit later of immigrants fleeing beatings in San Diego, have given way to a ruling whereby all LAPD squad cars will be equipped with video cameras. Reports from a recent eSchool News suggests that surveillance cameras under development will include software that interprets images and tips off security to prevent a crime before it happens. Other similar sophistications are planned to keep us safe from mayhem. What are the instructional implications for this changing area of literacy?

The case for media literacy in schools has more than been made. I am always excited when I hear about schools' various media literacy curricula. And I encourage English departments often to develop medial literacy programs that attend to analysis and production, even at the elementary level. Viewer-produced, professionally- produced, security and traditionally-broadcast images are all framed, positioned, lighted etc. Increased opportunities to produce digital video images, and to analyze those images is a necessary first step. But just as we wouldn't have a student produce a portfolio without a reflection on the artifacts collected, we need to not stop at production. Students should be taught to analyze the variety of categories of televisual production, just as we teach analysis of various forms of writing through writing and reading different genres.

And the next step: What kind of specialized training in the construction and interpretation of media images will administrative, security, legal, and policing professionals receive? How we will prevent the transference of racial profiling, sexism, etc. from distorting our interpretation and analysis of images in an effort to convey or consider televised truths?

ACT survey conclusion=More grammar instruction

2007-04-24T17:18:00.000-05:00

Today my copy of Aligning Postsecondary Expectations and High School Practice: The Gap Defined arrived in the mail. This ACT analysis of over 35,000 surveys completed by teachers from middle school through post-secondary institutions, including over 7,000 English teachers, yielded ten action steps for policymakers. One flummoxes me:

"Make sure that students attain the skills necessary for effective writing." OK, so far. But here is the next sentence: "The survey responses of post-secondary English/writing instructors suggest that high school language arts teachers should focus more on punctuation and grammar skills to better prepare their students for college-level expectations in college composition courses."

The explanation is that high school teachers ranked topic and idea development higher than postsecondary instructors, who ranked mechanics "more frequently among the most important groups of skills for success in an entry-level, credit-bearing postsecondary English/writing course."

My hope is to better understand this surprising finding by reading ACT National Curriculum Survey: 2005-2006, the booklet that accompanied the policy report. Perhaps I won't be so uneasy after I learn more about the specific survey questions and answers. My second hope, though, is that policy makers will not jump to conclusions based on a single statement that advocates greater focus on grammar and punctuation per se. Policy makers need to be helped to understand the importance of teaching grammar and punctuation in the context of authentic writing.

AAUP Report on Faculty Salaries

2007-04-12T08:07:00.000-05:00

The American Association of University Professors has issued its annual report on faculty salaries. You can follow through both the Chronicle of Higher Education's take and the Inside Higher Ed's take on the report. Moving up does not mean equity.

Ages 0-5: The Crucial Years

2007-04-11T15:49:00.000-05:00

Second-grade teacher David Keyes laments in The Washington Post on April 9 that schools with wealthy white students have a "distinct advantage when it comes to testing" under NCLB. "Their students grow up with "the intellectual abundance their wealth provides: books, educational videos and Baby Einstein games, to name a few." Of course, poor and minority children also have rich backgrounds: they "speak foreign languages, make music, tell vivid stories, and have other skills not typical of their peers. Their backgrounds, however, often do not provide them with the academic skills needed to succeed on standardized tests."

The Hamilton Project, situated at The Brookings Institution, (www.hamiltonproject.org) agrees with Keyes: "Before children even start kindergarten, there is already a marked difference in reading and math scores between the most advantaged and least advantaged children. Those who score poorly before entering kindergarten are likely to do less well in school and face an increased probability of being teen parents, engaging in crime, and being unemployed as adults." To address this problem a discussion paper by two researchers, Jens Ludwig and Isabel Sawhill, suggests in its subtitle "Intervening Early, Often, and Effectively in the Education of Young Children."

The authors note that the "largest disparities in cognitive and noncognitive skills are found along race and class lines well before children start school, even before they enroll in the federal Head Start preschool program at age three or four years. Most of America's social policies try to play catch-up against these early advantages--and most disadvantaged children never catch up."

The Success by Ten proposal challenges the country's commitment to young children and to their individual development and the country's future: "The most promising way to improve the learning outcomes of disadvantaged children would be to provide them with five years of high-quality, full-time early education and care outside the home, starting from birth." Yes, that is "starting from birth," so you can imagine the investment needed of resolve and resources. If you are interested in learning the features of such a program and on what bases the program is proposed, explore the report Success by Ten on the Hamilton Project website. Whether or not you agree with this particular program, the goal of supporting children during the crucial first five years of their lives deserves our serious attention.

TYCA West Makes News

2007-04-09T08:56:00.000-05:00

What we have all known is now an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed. TYCA West member Jason Pickavance tells about his experiences at a small, regional conference familiar to many of us, one of the TYCA conferences. It is very refreshing to see coverage of some of the not-necessarily-so-newsworthy-but-ultimately-very-important events that help us shape the work we do.

FIPSE Earmarks

2007-04-03T13:41:00.000-05:00

If it quacks, flies, looks like a duck . . . I suppose could be said of earmarks. In 2005, congressional earmarks for higher education out of the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) eliminated the grant competition. Since then, congressional earmarks funded by FIPSE have disappeared, but that does not mean that the whole FIPSE budget will be in the open grant program for the next year. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, Secretary Spellings has set aside almost half of the money budgeted for this year for FIPSE.

It is completely within the Secretary's purview to do this, but it is unusual. The original intent of the program is to promote the improvement and innovation of higher education without particular limitations. However, the Secretary has made it clear in several instances that she wants to move forward on the recommendations from the Commission of the Future of Higher Education's report, "A Test of Leadership." The two areas receiving the most attention from the Department of Education have been accountability, and you should spell that a-c-c-r-e-d-i-t-a-t-i-o-n, and K-12 to college alignment. Expect to see programs addressing transparency in accountability and high school to college alignment privileged in this round of applications. Not exactly an earmark, but still quacks a bit.

National Humanities Alliance Convention

2007-04-02T07:49:00.000-05:00

I have mentioned in recent blogs that the National Humanities Alliance annual meeting and Humanties Advocacy Day would be held on March 26-27, 2007, the Monday and Tuesday after CCCC. While most of us were scrambling to contextualize the CCCC convention with our campus work and ongoing scholarship, the NHA meeting combined with Humanities Advocacy Day was a great success. The shift to holding the annual meeting in conjunction with the visits to congressional representatives worked very well. The discussions we had with humanities agencies, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, at the annual meeting were good priming occasions for our visits on the hill the next day. Here is the report that the Associate Director of NHA, Erin Smith, posted. And, as Erin says, come back to the NHA site later to see more about the meeting.

2007-03-29T13:56:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week I observed a student teacher in an alternative certification program based out of San Francisco State University. The student teacher was teaching a vocabulary lesson to a diverse class of about twnety ninth-graders at Albany High School.

I was impressed with how the teacher who I'll call Gary taught the lesson, and how the students engaged the material. In a class period lasting about fifty minutes, Gary explored language with the students orally, in writing, and in pictures. Gary worked with students to have a kind of rote definition, a conceptual understanding, an application and an example of the term. Toward this end, he enabled students to incorporate popular culture references as examples of the terms they were studying; Gary redirected students' whose understanding strayed with poise and affirmation. He spent time with every student individually and worked with them as a whole class; Gary allowed for collaborative work in small groups and pairs, and also required independent attention from students. Gary allowed students to move around and he moved around himself. And he incorporated tactiles and visuals into the lesson.

Gary did all of this with a group of students with considerable calm and connectedness and no real disruptions. This wasn't the "honors" class, either. It was a very diverse class in an urban high school.

Gary is going to make a fine teacher. He already is. Credit also goes to Principal Ron Rosenbaum who recently presented on a panel at NCTE's 2007 CCCC Convention in New York. Ron was joined by teachers and researchers to talk about high school to college writing transition.

TYCA Makes News

2007-03-27T06:01:00.000-05:00

One of the pay-offs for the CCCC initiative in general and the TYCA Research Initiative in particular became evident this morning when I opened up Inside Higher Ed. The reporter covering the CCCC convention, Scott Jaschik, reported on the teaching load of community college faculty by referencing our documents on recommended student loads for teaching composition. Kudos to all for your hard work. The knowledge about our own work that we are gaining, and making usable, helps not only to inform us, but to inform the academy, and the larger public.

The Summit on Higher Education

2007-03-23T15:24:00.000-05:00

The Department of Education held their summit on the Future of Higher Education March 22 in Washington, DC. I was not able to attend, as I am at the CCCC convention in New York. But here are the two stories posted, one from Inside Higher Ed and the other from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Based on their stories, the dialogue is continuing. It might be a bit back and forth, but all good dialogue is. What we need to hope for is that the discussion will continue until good ideas begin to emerge.

News From CCCC

2007-03-23T15:19:00.000-05:00

The CCCC Annual Convention this week in New York City is a great success. Record-setting attendance, great sessions, good dialogue. In fact, so good that Inside Higher Ed is here and reporting on significant news for us. Here is their story from today.

Political Petitions and Social Network Site Solicitation

2007-03-22T12:22:00.000-05:00

A recent issue of eSchool News reports on an apparent contradiction: elected officials who supported legislation to block social networking Internet sites from schools and school libraries have put up profiles of themselves on MySpace, said to be the most popular of such sites.

Perhaps as candidates for their parties presidential nomination, they see new value in these sites that many artists, educators and activists already note. The article includes comments from the American Library Association pointing out the candidates' contradictions.

While contradictions count, I am concerned more about ethical communication.

Last year the Washington Post reported that staffers in the current administration were altering Wikipedia entries about officials in opposing parties with inaccurate information. The practice cut across both political parties. As teachers we are always concerned about our students successful navigation of information on the Internet. It is especially ironic when this process is impeded by persons with power over many facets of the lives of teachers and learners in educational settings.

The push for production increases, but the importance of critically navigating information remains. In fact, with increased opportunity and ease in production, the need for critical media literacy not only remains, it becomes even more important than ever before.

Is someone going to put up a Comment about this seeming change of perspective on the politicians' MySpace pages? Perhaps we should all send bulletins to our Friends List encouraging visits to the pages with critical eyes ready to comment on the politicians message, use of new media, and context for its use.

More opportunities to teach...

March Updates

2007-03-19T10:14:00.000-05:00

For those of you getting ready to head to New York for C's, hope to see you there. Cheryl Glenn has put together an excellent program, which you can access online to customize your own schedule. As you know from my reporting, assessments and accountability are high on my list, and there are sessions addressing those issues, as well as the multiple sessions addressing all our issues across the membership of CCCC.

The National Humanities Alliance has published its March update on humanities activities. You can find it here.

And the American Council of Learned Societies has just announced that their History E-Book is going to become the Humanities E-Book. All the details can be found here.

See you in New York.

Short Post on Video Games

2007-03-15T14:41:00.000-05:00

Last semester a guest speaker in the Urban Education course I co-taught with Jabari Mahiri asserted that she had heard video games are now outselling films. Intrigued, I asked where she had heard this info. She read it somewhere, but couldn't dig up the cite. I was disappointed.

As English teachers we have been teaching film as text for a long time. NCTE's books Reading the Reel World along with many other articles and presentations at NCTE conferences confirm film's place in the curriculum. And even as there are some who still feel that watching movies and television has no place in school, most have found a way to articulate instructionally valid and valuable uses for film. How many ninth grade English teachers have taught Homer's Odyssey alongside Lucas's Star Wars?

With film we explore content themes, literary and contextual elements and syntactical elementscuts, frames, fades, composition, etc. These are fixed elements constructed collaboratively (sometimes contentiously) by the film crew under the direction of producers and directors and occassionally creative consultants. There may be different versions of a film or teachers may select segments to show rather than a full feature. This undoubtedly makes things a bit more dynamic.

But video games by their nature are dynamic, unfolding narratives where each effect experienced is based on a conscious cause by the game player. The narrative is less fixed even as its origins may be rooted in a specific and perhaps well-known literary source. What new ways will educators use the games that are related to classic and diverse mythologies, film and other literary genres? On what will we focus and how? Will the act of conscious construction of a narrative take precedence over understanding fixed content upon which the game was based? Should it?

I look forward to teachers incorporating video games into instruction in the same way we pair films and novels or short stories.

Increased Literacy in Content Areas-Grades 4-12

2007-03-11T18:30:00.000-05:00

In Washington I work on behalf of NCTE with other subject area associations to discover what we can learn from one another about helping teachers to help students learn. Last week when Dr. Joseph Torgesen from the Florida Center of Reading Research and the Center on Instruction at Florida State University reported here on a major study on academic literacy instruction for adolescents, my antennae were up especially for what he had to say about improving literacy-related instruction in all content areas.

The five major recommendations about this topic in the 180-page report are

1. More explicit instruction and guided practice in the use of reading comprehension strategies

2. Increasing the amount of open, sustained discussion of content and ideas from text

3. Maintaining high standards for the level of conversation, questions, and vocabulary that are used in discussions and in assignments

4. Adopting instructional methods that increase student engagement with text and motivation for reading

5. More powerful teaching of content and use of methods that allow all to learn critical content

Do you notice that these recommendations focus a good deal on the use of language in a social context, pedagogical strategies to promote engagement and learning critical content, and high levels of expectation about the quality of discussion? Rather than finding the elements of reading emphasized by the National Reading Panel, this report gleaned through studying other major studies about adolescent literacy that these five strategies contribute in the most effective way to increased literacy among adolescents.

If you can share this report with colleagues in other subject areas, you will have much to talk about together. The report will soon be available in downloadable form at www.centeroninstruction.org. In the meantime, you might think about how the recommendations fit your own work. In answer to a question about English teachers' being responsible for teaching reading, Torgeson replied that ALL teachers are responsible, including English teachers. Using these recommendations in our English classes can make us more credible in talking with teachers in other subject areas--and increase students' desire and ability to read.

FY08 Budget

2007-02-06T13:47:00.000-06:00

For those of you who haven’t seen it, here is the Chronicle of Higher Education’s chart of President Bush’s FY08 budget plan as it affects higher education. Now the real work will begin as Congress will decide what to shift where, what to save, what to enhance--in short, what to fund.

Most of the FY07 spending that was not approved by both houses and signed into law before the election will be extended on a Continuing Resolution. The House has passed its version, and the Senate is expected to follow suit. Essentially, it leaves in place the spending levels of the FY06 budget for FY07. This isn’t an election year, so we can hope that Congress will work to pass the necessary allocations for FY08 before the year is out.

Very shortly the NCTE EC will approve its legislative platform for the year. Our next step is to work for NCTE advocacy either through your work with your legislators in your home district, or come to Washington for the NCTE Advocacy Day activities April 26th. Or, better yet, both. Click here for the Education Policy and English Language Arts Day information.

Pell Increase?

2007-02-01T14:25:00.000-06:00

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has announced that President Bush will request a signficant increase in the Pell grants for the FY08 budget, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education's special report. The 14% increase will raise the grant to $550. As the story mentions, no one is talking about where this money will come from, but the federal budget will be released February 8. We may even know before then as more details of the budget become available over the next week.

While it is all political at this point, with one party trying to trump the other, what is obvious is that the Commission on the Future of Higher Education's Report is having an effect. Both Congress and the President have moved on the affordability issue by asking for an increase in the Pell grant. The Department of Education has been pushing for change on accountability and accreditation that the accrediting groups are taking seriously.

Where does this lead? We will have to see. After all, this is the political year of posturing before the political year of campaigning.

Six Challenges of High School Reform

2007-01-30T11:56:00.000-06:00

On January 26, 2007 James Kemple of MDRC presented conclusions from a multi-pronged study of talent development high schools, first things first schools, and career academies. The study looked at impact, not outcomes: that is, the study valued incremental change and value added, not simply meeting desired outcomes.

The study has identified six major challenges of high school reform, and I wonder how these six fit the experience of NCTE members who teach high school.

1. Creating a personalized learning environment. When students have a supportive environment and positive relationships, particularly with faculty advisory systems, students do better. This alone, however, does not prevent dropout or raise achievement.

2. Enhancing basic literacy and math skills. The two enhancements studied were sequential transitional courses in 9th grade, which were associated with substantial improvements in performance and promotion to 10th grade, and double-blocked schedules to support the transitional courses. Focusing on the critical 9th year is crucial.

3. Improving instructional content and pedagogy. Because NCTE provides professional development, I was particularly interested in the three conclusions drawn are: (a) "Teachers benefit from well-designed curricula and lesson plans that have already been developed." (b) "Teacher professional development and coaching appear to be necessary for building instructional capacity and responsive teaching." and (c) "Student achievement may be enhanced when teachers work together to make sure that curricula and lessons are engaging, aligned, and rigorous."

4. Preparing students for the world beyond high school. "Career awareness and development activities, in and outside of school, provide effective tools for transitions to employment without limiting access to college."

5. Stimulating change and sustaining high performance. Two pieces of evidence here speak to NCTE activities. (a) "External expertise and intensive support appear to be critical to capacity building." and (b) "District support may not be a necessary condition for intitiating reforms, but is required for scaling up and long-term sustainability."

6. Building knowledge. The most interesting point here is that "a focus on outcomes and not on impact has left a track record of getting the wrong answer to the right question." Kemple believes strongly that "Modest improvements are policy relevant." Sharing progress at conventions, in publications, within schools, with policy makers, and in the media begins to correct the notion that only meeting an outcome is significant. Do you agree that incremental improvement is the reality and a positive reality?

If you are interested in more about this study, it is available in a MDRC publication
titled Meeting Five Critical Challenges of High School Reform. See www.mdrc.org

2007-01-02T13:44:00.000-06:00

Today when I read "Hello, Grisham--So Long, Hemingway?" in The Washington Post, my heart sank. The article identifies the following books as being dumped from various branch libraries in Fairfax Virginia because they had not been checked out in the last 24 months: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Wiliams, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well by Maya Angelou, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, and The Works of Aristotle. Not to be weeded out are the most checked-out books in December 2006, books by such authors as John Grisham, David Baldacci, James Patterson, Nelson DeMille, and Stephen King.

With more electronics and less shelf space, libraries are "struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes." This topic seems ideal for consideration in English classrooms. Students could do original research into the decision making processes at their local public libraries. They could consider what they think about the function of a public library. They might explore the decisions that determine what makes the shelves of their own school libraries. The discussion and debate that revolve around the function of libraries could lead to consideration of the reasons for reading materials in their classes, to their reading choices, to choices of their parents or family members, and to the place of literature in a society.

A number of neighborhood libraries in DC are bolted shut because of lack of funding. Why is that fact appalling to some and of little interest to others? Where do libraries fit in our priorities? If libraries remain open, what should they contain? All important questions.

Barbara Cambridge

To Tenure or Not To Tenure

2006-12-12T08:58:00.000-06:00

Two new reports on tenure came out in the same week--the long-awaited report from the Modern Language Association, and the AAUP's report on what kind of positions, tenured or non-tenured, are actually being filled in our institutions.

The MLA report is good. It thoroughly reviews what is happening with tenure in English studies and language programs, and its recommendations for where we need to go are good. If institutions and the academy accept and work toward the recommendations, the tenure process will be much improved.

But, as their report acknowledges, and the AAUP report confirms, it will speak to less than half the faculty. According to the AAUP report, up to 65% of faculty jobs are off the tenure line. That, to me, begs the question, "What is the value of tenure?" In a report in Inside Higher Education, reversing the full-time, part-time hiring pattern at Georgia State has had a positive impact on the faculty. This situation, while not the norm, is not unique. It also raises the question, is tenure necessary? Is it a good? I am not arguing that we should eliminate tenure. Instead, I am arguing that we must find a compelling case for tenure. Otherwise, the recommendations of the MLA report will be meaningless.

Humanities Updates

2006-12-12T08:29:00.000-06:00

The National Humanities Alliance has posted its December update on its site. Lots of announcements. And they have now posted the registration information for the National Humanities Alliance Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day. You can download the pdf and fax or mail your registration, or you can wait for the online registration form that should be up shortly. Previously, the NHA Annual Meeting had been held in conjunction with the ACLS Annual Convention, but this year NHA decided to hold its annual meeting in conjunction with Humanities Advocacy Day. Because the Advocacy Day has become such a good gathering time for Humanities advocates, this all makes sense.

It's the Part-Time Thing

2006-12-01T15:50:00.000-06:00

The recent Community College Survey of Student Engagement shows that part-time community college students are not as engaged in their in-class and out-of-class work as full-time students. I think most of us would have postulated that without the survey, but the survey gives evidence.

And, as reported in Inside Higher Education, a higher rate of part-time faculty results in a lower completion rate for community college students. Does anyone see a pattern here?

Students will continue to be part-time, and the percentages will grow, at both community colleges and universities. We will probably not see a reversal in the hiring patterns in higher education either. Which leaves us with the challenge: To design and shape a culture of engagement and learning in a culture that is not engaged. I am open for suggestions.

The Relationship of Formative and Summative Assessment

2006-12-01T11:34:00.000-06:00

In an October 13, 2006 blog entry prompted by an American Federation of Teachers policy forum Kent Williamson asks what assessment measures teachers use that provide them information to improve instruction. At the Spelling Commission forum on November 22, 2006 panelists Peg Miller and Peter Ewell made a distinction between the kind of formative assessment that provides such helpful information and the kind of summative assessment, sometimes labeled evaluation, that rates performance at a certain point in time. I am encouraged that we are beginning to distinguish between formative and summative assessment, not to affirm one over the other but to accent that each serves a particular purpose, formative primarily to improve teaching and learning and summative primarily to answer accountability needs.

At the same time that we make that distinction, however, we might also think how doing each kind of assessment might affect the other kind. To return to the AFT forum Kent referred to, listen to points made by Paul Barton in a forum presentation labeled "'Failing' or 'Succeeding' Schools: How Can We Tell?" Barton makes four points about accountability data, the kind of data most often generated by summative assessments.

First, Barton contends that current practices ignore basic standards of accountability because curricula and tests are not yet aligned. Test scores used for accountability are invalid if alignment is not in order. My take from this point: Pedagogy, curriculum, and formative assessment need to track with summative assessment.

Secondly, Barton states that a series of snapshots of students in different years does not measure what is learned by a student in a certain school year. Barton recommends administering the same test at the beginning and the end of the school year. My take on this point: Formative assessments can be used to track progress during that school year so that students can be helped to make more progress between summative assessments .

Thirdly, Barton says gains measured during the school year should be transparent to everyone, especially teachers and parents. Transparency would be supported by having student identifiers to track students from grade to grade or by stretch tests that cover several grades worth of work but are taken each year. Tests, however, are really not needed every year. Samples, rotating testing, or testing on an unannouced basis would free time for more diagnostic testing (formative assessment), which research shows improves instruction. My take on this point: A system of testing periodically can serve accountability while honoring more frequent formative assessment that serves teaching and learning.

Fourthly, standards need to be set for how much gain is expected in a year. Teachers need to say what is typical at a low end and at a high end. We can still have high expectations and disaggregate by subgroup under this standards system. My take on this point: Hurray that teachers are identified as the professionals who should set standards.

Each of Barton's points, it seems to me, recognizes the (potential) interaction of formative and summative assessment.

Do you have different takeaways from Barton's points? Do you have examples of how formative and summative assessments are functionally mutually well in your school? Do you have suggestions about how they might do so?

Barbara

Issue One--Accreditation

2006-11-30T15:18:00.000-06:00

The Department of Education has already begun to move forward on the recommendations of the report, "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U. S. Higher Education." Secretary Spellings' action plan listed three issues she would address; accessibility, affordability, and accountability. The first issue on her agenda is accountability, and the first item under that umbrella is accreditation. On November 29, 2006, the DOE held the "Accreditation Forum" to begin the discussion. Secretary Spellings emphasized when she charged the commission in the fall of 2005 that this would be the beginning of a dialogue, and that was reinforced both by the Forum's organizer, Vicky Schray, Senior Advisor, Office of the Undersecretary, DOE and Secretary Spellings at the Forum. Schray said that we are not here to lay blame or to come to consensus, but to spell out the issues that we should address. Spellings said that she was heartened by the response to the Forum and the work of the members, and that she wanted the higher education community to address the issues.

I must confess that I was initially ambivalent about this meeting, as I assumed accreditation would only include accreditors. But the roomful of invited participants, and Schray's opening comments, showed otherwise. She said that the Forum was convened to address the accreditation process with all the players, not just the accreditation agencies. In attendance were about 70 higher education professionals from around the country representing some of the major accrediting agencies, university/college system officers, institutional officers, policy/think-tank associations, and some of the higher education associations.

If you have not already read the Inside Higher Education and Chronicle of Higher Education stories on the Forum, they give a full picture of the meeting. I will comment on where our place is in this discussion.

Jane Wellman, a Senior Associate at The Institute for Higher Education Policy, in framing the day’s work, emphasized that the accreditation process is an evolved process, not a designed one. Peg Miller, the Director of the National Forum on College-Level Learning stated that one of the conclusions she has come to is that campus assessment cannot serve accountability. Peter Ewell said this in a different way when he said that there is a tension within the accreditation process between three roles: improvement-based peer review, quality assurance, and public information. He contended that current accreditation processes are pretty good at the first of these roles, but they diminish through the other two. Ewell’s concluding point was that maybe the assessment process is being asked to do too much, or if it is to fulfill all those roles it is woefully resource-poor to do it.

The working structure of the Forum was two sessions of discussion tables for the invited participants to address two issues: 1) student learning outcomes, and 2) institutional inputs (resources) and process standards. Not being an invited participant, I had to wait until the groups had worked through their questions and reported out. Kind of like watching student group work.

The report-out revealed that the discussions had been complex and generative. On the issue of student learning outcomes, the groups called for multiple measures, complex processes, establishment of clear outcomes, external audits, clarification between student achievement and student learning, need for common definitions and comparable data systems, clarification of expectations of learning for various degree levels, and the question of whether institutions or student learning should be the center of accountability. Like most good group work, the process prompted strong discussions.

The input or resource issue discussion, coming at the end of the day, still elicited good responses. First off, most of the groups argued with the question, saying that inputs cannot be established until outcomes are clarified. In that light, almost all of the groups said that outcomes trumps inputs. One group said that if the institution can document good outcomes, who cares what the inputs are. Another group said that institutions should be able to make the case for varying from input standards if they can achieve good outcomes. The argument, and we have heard it before, was that by establishing very strong input standards, you stifle creativity and innovation to achieve outcomes. One group did remind us that it is a balance between inputs and outcomes. You cannot have good outcomes if you do not have good inputs. The tension between inputs and outcomes is, of course, problematic. Too often we have agreed to focus on results, and the result has been an incomplete outcome clarification that shortchanges us. On the other hand, too strict an adherence to input standards increases the bureaucratic stasis too often found in our work.

Coming out of this discussion was a stronger and stronger argument for establishing outcomes, particularly in the core expectations for a degree. Writing, reading, and numeracy were specifically cited. Interestingly, no one from any of the discussion groups said we need to talk to disciplinary folks. When I said at the beginning of this report that it was a mixture of higher education professionals and stakeholders, two major groups were not at the table--faculty representing disciplines, and students.

The Forum did succeed in placing good stuff on the table. DOE will sift through all the notes, do a report, and then, in the words of Ms. Schray, "see what comes next."

So, where are we? There was a strong call for more meetings on this issue, and DOE heard that, loud and clear. The discussion raised come good issues, but a full explication of the issues and a clear articulation of progress will require that more stakeholders are at the table. If standards or outcomes are going to be articulated for reading and writing, we need to be part of that discussion.

National Humanities Alliance

2006-11-22T16:20:00.000-06:00

The National Humanities Alliance publishes a monthly update on activities in the Humanities across agencies, institutions, and policy boards. The November update, composed before the elections, is a nice collection of news items from around the country.

AAUP Statement on Part-Time Academic Appointments

2006-11-22T16:08:00.000-06:00

The American Association of University Professors has just approved and published its newest document on institutional practices for part-time faculty. Faculty rights and responsibilities are deeply embedded in the culture of higher education. The AAUP statement reinforces that those rights and responsibilities must be guaranteed for all faculty.

Literacy - The gift that keeps on giving

2006-11-20T11:26:00.000-06:00

Many Americans consider the time between Thanksgiving and the new year to be a season of giving. We find our mailboxes stuffed with reminders of those in need along with "free" address labels and a suggestion to support a cause. Similarly, during most any shopping escapade you are likely to experience the ringing bells of the Salvation Army. As a general rule, I am wary of donating money to causes for which I have no way to assess their accountability.

However, as someone with a language arts background and a love of reading, I have boxes of books from my last move. These are books that I've already read and probably won't read again. So, why am I keeping them? Well, I can't bring myself to through away a book, even a bad one. This year my wife and I have started looking for programs that can reuse these books to help the less fortunate. We got this idea after locating a local drop off program for books that are donated to prison libraries. I've listed and annotated some of the nationwide programs for book donations below. NCTE and its members have a wonderful history of donating books to the needy (most recently through our Tennessee affiliate at our annual convention and in the wake of hurricane Katrina). As you finish a book during the next few months, why not get a head start on a new year's resolution to increase literacy by donating your used books?

Here are some of the sites that I have seen. If you know of other donation ideas for used books, please leave a comment to this post so that we can all learn more about giving opportunities.

Books for Soldiers
http://www.booksforsoldiers.com/
Donate any type of media to any deployed soldier, airman, sailor, Marine, or Coast Guardsman who has an APO or FPO address.

Books Behind Bars
http://www.prisonpenpals.net/booksbehindbars.html
Help prisoners develop a lifetime habit of reading.

BookCrossing.com
http://www.bookcrossing.com/
Just leave a book somewhere in a public spot (an airport, train station, etc.) for someone else to pick up. You can even check the book's history on BookCrossing's website. See where it has been.

November Update

2006-11-08T09:55:00.000-06:00

"Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul . . . I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can," says Ishmael, describing one camp of followers after a November election. The other camp celebrates with the ecstatic glee that now we will, indeed, finally have sanity in government. I awoke to the damp, drizzly gloom of a November morning and a new Congress. What does that mean for higher education? Well, here are a couple of takes.

The Chronicle of Higher Education filed their report suggesting that financial aid would increase, and we would have more scientists and engineers. Inside Higher Education agreed with more aid, but said accountability is here to stay.

And, while state measures appear to only impact that particular state, one might read all the results to see if there is a trend. Here is the Chronicle's rundown of state ballot inititatives.

Rather than Melville or Pollyana as our political seers, perhaps we ought to turn to Thoreau. "Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star," and turn our attention to building the New Academy, regardless of the weather.

What Really Influences Student Writing?

2006-10-23T09:08:00.000-05:00

Writing Next, a metastudy of writing in middle schools and high schools released last week, found "eleven elements of effective adolescent writing instruction." They are (1) writing strategies, (2) summarization, (3) collaborative writing, (4) study of models, (5) specific product goals, (6) word processing, (7) sentence combining, (8) writing for content, (9) prewriting,
(10) inquiry activities, and (11) process writing approach learning. Although these elements are familiar to most NCTE teachers, they were presented as revelatory practices which the report writers advocate now be taken up by those making education policy and by teachers to improve writing of middle and high school students.

One researcher of this report funded by the Carnegie Corporation explained that only comparative studies of this kind can yield evidence for policy making and can also influence practice in classrooms across the nation. Former NCTE officers interviewed for the October 19 issue of Education Week disagreed, explaining that inquiry-based teacher research in the classroom generates knowledge that can be applied in teaching and learning and add to the knowledge base in the field. And, if that is the case, this research needs to be available to policy makers in a form that they understand and find useful.

As Writing Next gets taken up by interested policy makers who now primarily value this kind of comparative study, I wonder how we can put classroom-based research on the table as well. We know that single examples of classroom practice can be influential. For example, this morning in The Washington Post, a front-page article claims, "Clauses and Commas Make a Comeback."
Featuring one teacher in a local high school, the article feeds the notions of panelists who responded to the Writing Next release that didn't list grammar as one of the elements that contributes to effective writing instruction. Two panelists, a community college president and a politically well connected attorney, extolled the importance of grammar instruction in the very forum in which the featured publication refuted their ideas based on personal stories. They were convinced by their own life stories of the importance of grammar being taught as a separate subject.

Single examples and stories, however, lack the strength to undergird practice or policy over time. The Washington Post example of a teacher who believes in teaching grammar, augmented by a look at neighboring high schools and reference to NCTE publications about grammar, contains no evidence of the influence of grammar teaching on student learning. Although one student is quoted as having received 11 out of 12 on the SAT writing test, no link is made between instruction in grammar and that testing outcomes.

A position between studies with experimental and comparative groups and stories with no evidence of impact of instructional practices is inquiry-based research. Teachers who design studies of their own practice and communicate findings to others in the field engage in what is now often called the scholarship of teaching and learning. Designed teacher inquiry that yields evidence about student learning needs to be communicated for multiple audiences, including the policy makers for whom Writing Next authors claim only comparative studies analysis will make a difference of for whom newspaper accounts of interesting practice seem instructive.

Do comparative studies influence your own practice? Do you rely on anecdotes, however interesting? Do you do inquire into your own practice, either yourself or with colleagues? Have you thought about putting the findings from your designed inquiry into a form that policy makers could understand and value? What does influence writing instruction for middle and high school students?

Resources

2006-10-19T09:37:00.000-05:00

In spite of, or maybe because of, congress heading back to the hills for the elections, there is a nice variety of stories from the National Humanities Alliance. The October update chronicles everything from congressional action (or lack of) to Center for the Book Literature Awards.

Speaking of books and libraries, another good resource is the American Library Association's Association of College and Research Libraries website for resources and discussion lists. If you scroll down the page, you will find many different sites that may interest you. For instance, here is the one for Literatures in English.

For those of you who have not yet found the Carnegie Foundation website, their Perspectives page provides good essays about our work. This month it is about opening up dialogue between student teachers, teacher educators, and supervising teachers to create a "sharing of wisdom" around the practice of teaching.

TYCA Guidelines Document

2006-10-18T14:43:00.000-05:00

With the publication of the Guidelines for the Academic Preparation of English Faculty at Two-Year Colleges, TYCA stepped forward to say that faculty work in two-year colleges requires more than just preparation for research in areas of English studies. Not only must two-year college English faculty have a thorough grounding in the field of lower-divsion English studies, primarily composition and introductory level literature courses, but they must understand the culture and student population of these open-door institutions. As the academy recognizes that we need to review our graduate programs to prepare future faculty for the complex work of the professoriate, we need to remember that institutional diversity is another part of that complexity.

At the two-year college level, more promotion of our guidelines comes from the National Council on Instructional Administrators. They have included an abstract and link to our guidelines in their Instructional Leadership Abstracts for September of 2006. Our thanks to them for promoting our guidelines.

Faculty Support for Student Success

2006-10-17T15:33:00.000-05:00

The notice that a new study on the effect of adjunct appointments on student success brings with it the news that is not a real surprise, those schools who rely more heavily on adjunct faculty appointments lag behind institutions with fewer adjunct appointments in terms of traditional models of student success.

The study will be published in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Higher Education. While the study confirms what we have suspected (known might be a better word), it also identifies what some of those factors are. It is not adjunct faculty per se, but how faculty are supported and made part of the institutional structure. It is the faculty members involvement in the institutional life--office time, committee time, advising time, and even just the time to socialize with other faculty. If it takes a village to educate a child, then we might expand that metaphor and recognize that it is the institutional community that educates our college students. In short, our students do better when they are taught by members of the community. What we need to do is figure out how to ensure that all faculty are members of the institutional community.

Grounded in Reality

2006-10-17T15:03:00.000-05:00

I just returned from a visit to the TYCA PNW annual conference. For those who don’t know the acronym, that is the Two-Year College English Association, Pacific Northwest Regional. Continuing for those of you unfamiliar with the TYCA family, these regional conferences are vibrant demonstrations of teacher-scholars at work. It was good to break bread and share ideas with them. For those of you familiar with the TYCA family, you know it was like "old home week" for me.

Let's get this straight--I enjoy my work down here. There is something wonderfully heady and exuberant about joining the throngs of people weaving through the sidewalks to work, to come out of the metro tunnel into the sunlight at the Capitol South Metro Stop and realize I am in the center of the most politically powerful city in the world. But it isn't always real, and I know that. But it is easy to be sucked into the vortex of rumor mills, top story of the day, winners and losers on the national scene, and the playing with people to gain power.

But at TYCA PNW (and other regionals) I find myself amongst real people who are real teachers working with real people who are real students in real spaces--their home classrooms, hallways, benches on campus, email exchanges, and the other constant, human work of education. Let me give one example. I attended a session on critical inquiry in writing classes. The presenters included a seasoned faculty member (is that politically correct?) a mid-career faculty member, a relatively new faculty member, and an adjunct faculty member who balanced two community college assignments. All had the excitement of kids in the park who had found a new game that gave them a sense of life. They showed how critical inquiry could free students in a) an advanced or honors-type writing class, b) a typical first-year college composition class, and c) developmental English courses. They were honest about their work, questioning what was problematic and showing how what worked really helped their students. Different stages of their careers, and different assignments in different institutions, they were all working together. What was really impressive is that they kept coming back to, not their work, but their students' struggles and successes. And they did it with a degree of collegiality and respect between each other, regardless of their stage in their career or their institutional affiliation, that demonstrated the ideal academy.

As I left the conference and headed back east to the adult Disneyland we call Washington, I was rejuvenated--not with what I could take to the classroom I have abandoned, but with the need to ensure we have policy in place to allow these real teachers to work with real students in real environments. And for that, I thank you all out there who wake on Monday morning, excited to face the most important challenge--giving voice and therefore life to our students.

AFT releases new policy report: Smart Testing, Let's Get It Right

2006-10-13T15:31:00.000-05:00

This week, the American Federation of Teachers hosted a forum that featured the presentation and discussion of a paper authored by education writer and consultant Paul Barton. The paper, “Smart Testing: Let’s Get it Right: How assessment-savvy states have become since NCLB?” asserts that only 52 percent of states’ tests are aligned to strong standards, allowing some to conclude that states are doing a better job in developing content standards than in using them to drive assessment. As a result, testing that is not aligned with strong standards drives many accountability systems. This “drift into test-based accountability” is troubling to many educators.

Two years ago, the NCTE Executive Committee adopted Framing Statements on Assessment that describe the Council's guiding principles on assessment. Further, NCTE has endorsed a Joint Organizational Statement on the No Child Left Behind Act that emphasizes the need for the law to "to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement."

What assessment practices do you value? Does the current policy emphasis on accountability make it easier, or more difficult, for you to engage in the kinds of assessment practices you believe work best?

Met Life Survey of the American School Teacher, 2006: Expectations and Experiences

2006-10-13T15:04:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, Met Life released their annual survey describing attitudes and experiences of American teachers. In many years, this annual study challenges widely-held perceptions of teachers and our work in the classroom. This year was no exception. It points out that professional respect is a critical component of teacher satisfaction, and is even more important to experienced teachers than early-career colleagues. A few highlights:

Being treated as a professional by the community is a key driver of teacher satisfaction.
Dissatisfied teachers are more than twice as likely as satisfied teachers to feel that they are not treated as a professional by the community (36% vs. 15%).
One-quarter of teachers (27%) say it is likely they will leave the profession in the next five years.
Teachers who plan to leave are more likely than others to report worse experiences than
expected with the professional prestige of teaching (44% vs. 34%), salary and benefits (40% vs. 30%) and control over their own work (24% vs. 13%).

--BUT--our problems with teacher retention are more significant with long-term professionals than new teachers:

Teachers with 21 or more years experience are nearly four times as likely as new teachers (less than five years experience) to plan to leave teaching to go into a different occupation (44% vs. 12%).

--AND--in some ways, new teachers are better prepared for meeting challenges posed by issues that have arisen in recent years than their more experienced counter-parts:

New teachers (less than five years experience) are more likely than their peers with 21 or more years experience to feel prepared to engage families in supporting their children’s education (42% vs. 27%), work with children with varying abilities (42% vs. 30%) and maintain order and discipline (44% vs. 34%).
New teachers are more likely than their veteran peers to have mentors (82% vs. 16%).
New teachers’ expectations are more aligned with the realities of teaching. They are less likely to report that the number of special needs students they would work with (34% vs. 44%) and their professional prestige (21% vs. 41%) were worse than they expected upon entering the profession.

To me, this suggests that we cannot neglect the need to provide support, growth, and renewal experiences for experienced teachers. Through innovative teacher education and induction programs, there is evidence that we are making progress in equipping early-career teachers to succeed. Now, we must also take seriously the challenge of fighting burn-out, and nurturing the talents and capacity of veteran teachers who have so much to offer the next generation of students. What did you find interesting in the survey results?

Curriculum focal points at the national level

2006-10-09T13:10:00.000-05:00

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has just published curriculum focal points for prekindergarten through grade 8 mathematics (www.nctm.org). Focal points are the most important three mathematical topics for each grade level, as determined by teachers in those grade levels. A focal point is a cohesive cluster of related knowledge, skills, and concepts.

Because of the profusion of curricular goals, different within and across states, NCTM decided through a wide vetting process to provide a framework for curricular expectations and assessments that it hopes will prompt dialogue within and across states and school districts about what is important mathematically at different grade levels. NCTM states, "Organizing a curriculum around a set of focal points, with a clear emphasis on the processes of mathematics, as outlined in NCTM's Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (i.e. problem solving, reasoning and proof, communication, connections, and representation), can provide students with a connected, coherent, ever expanding body of mathematical knowledge and ways of thinking."

What would focal points for English language arts be in each grade from prekindergarten through grade 8? What three focal points would you suggest for the grade level(s) you teach? Would having focal points help your teaching if they were part of a sequence of focal points across grade levels and valued by your school district and state in curriculum design and assessment?

Polling Parents of Students of Color

2006-09-29T10:51:00.000-05:00

Polls are abundantly used to test public opinion. But did we really need a poll of parents of students of color to find out that these parents, like others, have high educational expectations for their children? Why not just assume that all parents want the best for their children and focus on an educational system that supports that belief?

View related article.

The Secretary's Plan of Action

2006-09-28T10:07:00.000-05:00

Department of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced her plan of action for the Commission on the Future of Higher Education Report. When she created the Commission, she identified four areas of study for the Commission; accountability, access, affordability, and quality. Her plan of action addresses the first three.

HEA Rauthorization

2006-09-28T09:55:00.000-05:00

It looks like Congress will follow the time-honored process of deciding not to decide on the Higher Education Act Re-authorization. No news is no news.

Reading First Controversy

2006-09-28T08:41:00.000-05:00

Have you had a chance to read the Inspector General's report on Reading First Grant Reviews? It's a revealing, even explosive, report. What do you think it means for the future of NCLB? What reforms are needed to keep this kind of corruption from poisoning the grant review process in the future?

Digitized News

2006-09-25T16:45:00.000-05:00

Over the past two years, the American Council of Learned Societies has conducted a study of the cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. That report is now available on their website. The report is intended to clarify the definition of cyberinfrastructure as the collective of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry. It is not just the hardware that is available, but the totality of technology that changes the way we work, think, and create new knowledge. It is hoped that this report will be foundational in developing the rest of the protocols necessary for continued humanistic and social science work.

Anticipating, or developed in concert, is a new program from the National Endowment for the Humanities. NEH has just released its Digital Humanities Initiative. Chairman Bruce Cole, in introducing the program to a group of us, used the example of the change in scientific work because of digital technologies by referencing the mapping of the human genome. This is possible only with digitization. He said that we need to explore and demonstrate the same in the humanities—what digitization allows us to do that we would not otherwise be able to do. With that, NEH is introducing two new grant programs, the digital humanities fellowships and the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants. These two programs would be reviewed within the Digital Humanities Initiative, but all the other traditional programs in NEH also welcome digitally emphasized work.

So there you have it. A framework for how we will be working, and some grant opportunities to explore it. Gee, I make it sound so easy!

Richard Allington to Discuss NCLB at NCTE Annual Convention

2006-09-25T08:56:00.000-05:00

Richard Allington will discuss how the influence of NCLB does not encourage engaging children in independent reading activities or in rich and varied composing activities. Instead NCLB's influence is to place children in one-size-fits-all controlled and contrived packaged programs. He will also share research-based but unprofitable scientific strategies for improving reading improvement. A discussion session will follow the presentation.

Jerome C. Harste Featured Speaker at NCTE Annual Convention

2006-09-25T08:44:00.000-05:00

Jerome C. Harste, a Past President of NCTE, is a professor of Language Education at Indiana University where he holds the distinction of being the first Martha & Bill Armstrong Chair in Teacher Education. His major interests are the Reading and Writing Process, Early Literacy, Reading Comprehension, and Critical Literacy. Harste has been quoted as saying, “Children, rather than tests, need to become our curricular informants.”

Diane Ravitch Featured Speaker at NCTE Annual Convention

2006-09-22T16:12:00.000-05:00

Diane Ravitch will be referring to the research that she did in writing The Language Police about the censorship protocols used by publishers as they compile textbooks, as well as the low quality of much of the textbook content.
Her presentation will juxtapose the quality of the typical textbook with the genuine excitement to be found in reading novels, poems, essays, and other writings, sent in the context of their time, with understanding of their author and his or her era. She will refer, in part, to The American Reader and The English Reader, both of which are sources for authentic writings.

Mona Golabek and Jane Foley Featured Speakers at NCTE Annual Convention

2006-09-22T15:58:00.000-05:00

Milken Family Foundation and Grammy-nominated concert pianist Mona Golabek present the inspiring story of her mother, a music prodigy who escaped 1938 Vienna abroad the Kindertransport. The author shares excerpts and selections on a Steinway piano. Classroom applications, free companion inter-disciplinary materials, and access to the book for reduced rates are described.

The Commission’s Report

2006-09-19T16:44:00.000-05:00

The Department of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education has just released its report, “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U. S. Higher Education.”

In addition, in my last blog I commented that AAUP is hosting “A Dialogue on Contingent Faculty” on November 17 in Washington, DC. Invited will be the higher education groups in the Washington, DC area. I have been asked to be a discussion leader at one of the tables where we will address the issue of the faculty appointments that fall outside of traditional full-time, tenured positions. At that meeting, AAUP will release a new report on the utilization of contingent faculty. This study will be an index of contingent faculty appointments, institution by institution. It will attempt to include all faculty positions, teaching and non-teaching, to give a picture of just what the full faculty cohort looks like at each institution.

Has NCLB Affected Your Teaching?

2006-09-19T15:29:00.000-05:00

Today more than ever we need to speak up to
policymakers and members of our communities and tell them our personal stories
of good teaching and learning! Please take a few minutes to write a letter
to the editor of your local newspaper and share your story of how NCLB has
affected your work as a literacy educator.

Write your own story and feel free to use information from
these NCTE resources:

results from an April 2006 survey
on how NCLB has affected NCTE members' teaching
the NCTE Legislative Platform
talking points on Teacher Quality, Assessment, Narrowing of Curriculum, and
Professional Development

See our Tips for Writing Letters to the Editor
Print or open in a new window these instructions for using Congress.org to submit your
letter, then click on the logo below to go to
Congress.org
Take a moment to complete our September 2006 survey about how NCLB has affected
your teaching and your students' learning.
Did you send a letter to the editor of your local
newspaper? Please forward a copy of your letter to slate@ncte.orgslate@ncte.organd
complete this short report form.
If your letter does run in the newspaper, please send us a
clipping: SLATE Responses, NCTE, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096;
fax: 217-278-3760

Dispatch from DC

2006-09-15T16:43:00.000-05:00

Welcome back to the new term. Or, as Emerson says in “The American Scholar,” “I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year.” There is a peaceful, albeit warm and muggy, lassitude about DC in August. All the major players are on vacation or back in their home territories, and the streets, sights, and restaurants are relaxingly taking care of those of us who remain with the tourists to enjoy the city.

Labor Day changes all that. Once again, ties and coats replace open shirts. Business skirts and jackets replace slacks and blouses or summer dresses. Dark blue and black becomes the color of the day. We walk between meetings with serious intensity, no longer wandering over to the pond to watch the ducks. Business calls, and we answer.

With the return to work come the updates and notices to get us started—kind of like a close look at the syllabus. I have always understood a syllabus in the hands of a good teacher, like a recipe in the hands of a good cook, as a suggested journey, and it may include some interesting digressions and variances along the way; but it will inevitably lead to a dish that delights, surprises, and educates both cook and partakers. The mixing of metaphors was deliberate, and may show that I am not the cook I imagine. Therefore, the updates and an attempt at a syllabus—remember to season to taste:

National Humanities Alliance

Every month the National Humanities Alliance (NHA), of which we are a member, issues an update. Here is September’s: https://mail2.cni.org/lists/nha-announce/Message/20189.html. For the yearly syllabus, there is a change in the date of the NHA annual membership meeting. Previously, the annual meeting has been held in conjunction with the ACLS annual meeting in May, but this year the NHA will hold its annual membership meeting in conjunction with Humanities Advocacy Day, March 19-20, 2007. While many of you will probably be in New York the preceding week for the CCCC Annual Convention, if you are in the area, the NHA meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day are great opportunities to address concerns for academic humanities and to advocate for humanities support from Congress. One of the advantages of having a DC-based office is that I can become more involved in NHA work, and I am on the planning committee for the NHA meeting next spring. Feel free to contact me if you have ideas for speakers. Because of the close alliance between NHA and ACLS, there will be a session or two of NHA sponsored events at the ACLS meeting as well.

American Council of Learned Societies

Speaking of the ACLS, their annual meeting next May will be in Montreal, May 10-12. For those of you (like me) who do not do much international travel, remember that you will need a passport to enter Canada, so if you are planning on the ACLS, you might want to start that process. But the big news for ACLS, as Patti Stock, our ACLS delegate, and I have mentioned before, is the expansion of their fellowship program. They have expanded some existing fellowships, and added new ones, particularly in technology. You can also see a report on last spring’s convention on their site.

The Spellings’ Commission

The full title is “A National Dialogue: The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.” The Commission has published the final working draft of the report, and will deliver the final copy to the Secretary of Education on September 25, 2006. Already there are various rumblings about the report, with responses I have already referred to in previous blogs (see below). An interesting new development, however, is the response to the announcement that DOE will use its rule-making meetings to implement some of the report’s findings. That brought a response from members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions saying that most of the recommendations would require legislative action. This might be one of those interesting digressions in the syllabus.

AAUP Statement on Adjuncts

The American Association of University Professors is preparing to vote on adding recommendations for part-time faculty appointments as an addition to “Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” As reported in Inside Higher Education, this places the issue on the agenda for the year. The AAUP invites comments on its draft that will be voted on at its annual meeting next spring. The AAUP is also sponsoring a “Dialogue on Contingent Faculty” with other Washington, DC based higher education groups on November 17, 2006. More on this when I know more.

The “not quite” Syllabus

What we have before us is more of a reading list than a syllabus. We may have been able to get by with that in the 20th century, but we will need to get used to our syllabi containing clearly stated outcomes in the 21st century. Here is a start:

Outcome 1: By the end of the literary year, we will have clearly articulated the humanities values in English and language arts studies at all levels of education.
Outcome 2: By the end of the literary year, we will have a clear plan to articulate our proposals for the future of higher education in English studies.
Outcome 3: By the end of the literary year, we will have helped shape the beginnings of a national policy for all faculty appointments in the academic workforce.

While I am being somewhat facetious in stating outcomes, I am serious on the issues. We need to reassert the fundamental human values of the work we do at all levels. We need to clarify how we can improve learning results at all levels, and higher education’s role in that. And we need to address the state of the faculty who teach all of our courses.

Looks like good work before us.

Response to the Commish

2006-08-28T16:42:00.000-05:00

When Chicken Little comes running into the room exclaiming, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” as academics, our response should be, “and is that necessarily a bad thing?” What do we mean by the sky is falling? Is it the sky or the ceiling? On whom is it falling? In its fall, what is revealed behind the “apparent” sky that is “apparently” falling? The questions can go on, but our response to a statement of alarm should be a reasoned reflection leading to a broader understanding of the reported phenomenon.

Which brings us to the report of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Are there problems in higher education? Obviously, yes. Are the problems the Commission identifies the real problems? Well, yes and no. In my first blog on the Commission (see below), published September 21, I questioned whether the questions Secretary Spellings asked were the right questions. I postulated that we would find out more about finances, enrollments, and global competitiveness, but I questioned whether the report would address the real issues that impact finances, enrollments, and global competitiveness. While I still see much potential in a Commission on the Future of Higher Education, I think this study was too quick, too pre-conceived, and too superficial to address the real needs. Chicken Little has cried, and we must now do the analysis of his cry to support and promote the real changes needed in higher education.

So . . . let’s see what the Commish wants.

Every student should have the opportunity to pursue postsecondary education. That means students need to have the appropriate preparation to enter college, understandable directions on how to get into college, and the financial opportunities to afford college.

The financial aid system should be restructured to privilege needs over merit and to be simple enough that the average student can apply. Furthermore, institutions should be rewarded for finding innovative ways to control costs.

We need to create a robust culture of accountability and transparency throughout higher education. That means knowing how well we actually educate our students.

We must change our academic programs to serve the needs of a knowledge economy by embracing a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement through new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies.

Our citizens must have access to high quality and affordable education throughout their lives through promotion of life-long learning opportunities.

The United States must ensure capacity to achieve global leadership in science, engineering, medicine, and other knowledge-intensive programs.

Well, on the surface that doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, I could get behind most of them. Except that the report goes on in each area to spell out what they mean. And the problem is that they are applying action-oriented, quick-fix responses to complex issues that, I agree, need fixing, but cannot be done overnight.

The truth of the matter is, higher education is already addressing most of those concerns. Most of the knowledge about them is relatively public for the higher education community, being noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education to name the two most obvious sources. In addition, a report issued by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education titled “American Higher Education: How Does It Measure Up for the 21st Century?” highlights most of the same issues.

So, why the fuss and overzealous tone and frustration about the Commission’s report? Well, it might be that, yes, we know about these issues, but, no, we haven’t really placed them at the top of our agendas. Instead, we have been very busy denying that Chicken Little is seeing anything. And maybe we have been too busy debating whether it really is the sky that is falling. So, our job as academics needs to follow the next step, what Emerson called the scholar as actor. We must act on our knowledge.

At the AAC&U annual convention in Washington, DC last January, one of the deans of a large research university talked about how he initiates change in undergraduate general education. When questioned how to do it on his type of campus, he said it was “little by little and piece by piece.” He is right. All change must start where it can get a foothold. And meaningful change cannot be mandated from a policy board, it must come from the people most involved in making the change happen. But it is time to get beyond “little by little and piece by piece.”

We know we need to improve the success rate for all our students. We need to accelerate the adoption of the scholarship of teaching and learning on all our campuses. We need to ensure that the students who come to our classes are met with faculty who are prepared to engage them in an interactive dialogue that makes their learning real. We need to look closely at what succeeds and what does not, and not be satisfied that it is “the student’s fault” when she or he has trouble in our class. The students don’t come through the door reluctantly, but their reluctance to persevere has a whole lot to do with the nature of what they find when they come through the door.

Improving higher education is a complicated business. David Ward’s interview in the Chonicle of Higher Education about his refusal to sign the report articulates some of that complexity. The change won’t come in mandated quick fixes that the report advocates, but in the serious, hard work of the higher education community and its partners. We know what to do, let’s do it.

News and Notes

2006-08-22T16:41:00.000-05:00

Once again, the updates from the National Humanities Alliance can be found on their website. Here is the August report.

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education met on August 10 to ratify their report that will be edited and prepared for delivery to Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in September. The DOE has already announced that they will hold a series of meetings to discuss how the federal rule making process can be used to implement parts of the report. With the release of the near final draft, several organizations have weighed in with comments. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has been working for most of this century on improving undergraduate education with their Greater Expectations initiative. Their response to the Commission is quite pointed about what was missed. Also, the Association of American Universities issued a report earlier that was critical of draft two of the report.

And finally, for those of you who have enjoyed Cliff Adelman’s reports from the Department of Education, he is moving to the Institute for Higher Education Policy, as reported in Inside Higher Education.

Ideas Needed for NCTE's 100th Anniversary

2006-08-19T15:16:00.000-05:00

2011 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the National Council of Teachers of English. The Task Force on Council History and 2011 is working to plan events for this watershed year, and we need input from all interested NCTE members. What would you like to see highlighted and in what format during the Centennial year? Any ideas for publications, books, products, and convention events are all appreciated.

Send your ideas to:

Leila Christenbury, Chair, Task Force on Council History and 2011
P.O. Box 842020
School of Education
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA 23284-2020
Email: lchriste@vcu.edu

Good News on a National Scale

2006-08-17T16:24:00.000-05:00

I don’t know about you, but I become weary with all the negative news that is reported about education on multiple fronts. Katie Couric’s journey across the nation as she prepared for her news anchor position unearthed a widespread craving for positive as well as negative news, so there must be others like me who don’t want to wear rose-colored glasses but do want to hear about what is going well.

Today, August 16, at noon ACT released information about students in the high school graduating class of 2006 who took the ACT test. College readiness improved in all four subject areas with an average national composite score of 21.1, up from 20.9 in the past two years. As ACT reports, “Scores were higher for both males and females and for students across virtually all racial/ethnic groups.” ( policycenter@act.org) The fact that the scores were higher across subgroups in the high school population is particularly heartening.

Of particular interest to NCTE members, nearly 70% of students met or exceeded the college benchmark score for English/composition—much higher than the share achieving the reading (53%), science (27%), or math (42%) benchmarks. This suggests that K-12 teachers are making real progress in teaching English language arts. If you are interested in your own state results, ACT’s website shows complete score information for each state.

Even though the ACT Writing Test is a less authentic writing sample than most NCTE teachers would wish for, that is students write for 30 minutes to a given essay prompt, this first year of the test sets a baseline for the future. Because the writing score is not in the composite, it’s worth noting that students earned an average score of 7.7 (on a scale of 2 to 12) on the exam. “On the combined English Test/Writing Test score, the average score was 22.0 (on a scale of 1 to 36).” Females outscored males on the Writing Test by .5 with racial/ethnic groups having a spread of 6.8 for African Americans to 8.0 for Asian Americans.

Although the ACT report comes with calls for more rigorous requirements for courses and for course taking, the report opens with the good news that “national ACT scores rose significantly in 2006.” It’s encouraging to hear these results about those in our most recent high school graduating class who took the test. Of course, many students did not take the ACT, and we have much work to do to increase college readiness in all subject areas. I am glad, nonetheless, that the public has heard today that the hard work of students and teachers, especially in English language arts, has yielded results in this one of many indicators of educational accomplishment.

A Real “‘Reality Show’—Mommy, You’re Giving Me a Headache”

2006-08-15T16:30:00.000-05:00

You need to be timely when you “blog”, so this should not qualify. After all, it is about the aftermath of “Katrina”. Could there be anything left to say and if so, how relevant is it to education?

Like so many others, not to mention the victims themselves, we would all like to put it all behind us. But everyday something happens to remind us.

I remember the little girl in the news who said to her mother, who was distressed about what Katrina had done to her family and as she recounted it for the umpteenth time, “Mommy, you are giving me a headache.” Then recently, I read about the young college student, a developing poet, whose preschool teachers had said to her mother, “Mrs. Robinson, this child can write.” And so she did, all through elementary, high school, and college. Then Katrina came on her 21st birthday and she lost “every bit of her writing from childhood on. If she sat and thought about it for a long time [she] says she’d cry. So she doesn’t” (Washington Post, 8/8/06, p. A2). Instead, she writes poems. She continues to do what she has been gifted with.

Two different scenarios. Just as that preschool teacher recognized and acknowledged a talent, I hope some other teacher has found and recognized the talent in the little girl who was so sensitive to her mother’s pain that it hurt her also. Now that would be a worthy real “reality”.

Say You Are Sorry

2006-08-14T16:29:00.000-05:00

When does "I’m sorry" count as a sincere form of contrition --especially when race is the issue? D.C Police Inspector Andy Solberg made this comment, "This is not a racial thing to say that Black people are unusual in Georgetown. This is a fact of life." He has been experiencing grief over those remarks ever since.

Now we could dissect the statement from a lot of perspectives – are Black people just "unusual" or are we "unusual" only when we are in Georgetown? It was a slip of the tongue. He did not mean to say it. Surely, he did not consider the ramifications of his words. In other words, as many young Black children (and possibly those of other races.) have been told (or used to be told), "think before you speak". The Inspector did not do that. And now that he has had time "to think" (and has been told how offensive his remarks were), he says simply, "I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t think that needs an explanation. I’m sorry."

And I would venture that most people hearing (or reading) about his "mea culpa" accept his explanation. A simple "I’m sorry" can do much not only to heal but to prompt discussion and learning. In this case, the Inspector talked to others about his remarks, he researched the history which helped him to discover things he did not know about Georgetown, and more importantly, about Black people in the area.

Perhaps we all should use the term more often, if we really are "sorry", that is, about an unintended hurt to someone.

Using NCTE Position Papers for Your Own Purposes

2006-08-14T16:20:00.000-05:00

On Friday, August 18 representatives from four subject matter associations in Washington-English, science, social studies, and mathematics-will join together for an informal conversation about ways in which we might collaborate. We will use a selection of our associations’ position papers to discover commonalities and differences in perspective and policy.

I got the idea for the position paper agenda for this meeting from a generative session I attended at this year’s Whole Language Umbrella Institute. During this session Caryl Crowell, Yvetta Goodman, and Prisca Martens helped us think about ways to use three NCTE documents: “On Reading, Learning to Read, and Effective Reading Instruction,” “A Call to Action: What We Know about Adolescent Literacy and Ways to Support Teachers,” and “Features of Literacy Programs Decision Making Matrix.” It was encouraging to hear how these papers are already being used out in the field, i.e. for structuring a graduate program for secondary education majors, as a common read for a study group of principals, by literacy coaches working with teachers, as a form of professional development with curriculum developers, and as a way to connect English and science teachers.

Have you used an NCTE policy paper for any of your own purposes? I keep a folder of print copies of some of the papers that I might need the most in conversations with other groups here in Washington. For example, at a meeting of the National Adolescent Literacy Coalition that centered on English Language Learners, I quoted from the April 2006 NCTE Position Paper on the Role of English Teachers in Educating ELLs. With the renewal of the push toward English as a National Language, I could cite a much earlier, 1997 position statement in which NCTE opposed such a move, based on, among other things, research that confirms English language learners acquire English more easily if they are literate in their native language. I used NCTE’s policy paper on multi-modal literacy during an International Society for Technology in Education meeting that explored how best to help teachers integrate technology into instruction.

Although each of us works in different contexts, we all are supported through the official policy statements of NCTE. In high stakes situations, having the backing of our major professional association can boast confidence in taking a stand, upholding an individual voice. Check out NCTE’s policy statements on the NCTE website at http://www.ncte.org/about/over/positions.

If you have used or in the future do use one of NCTE’s official statements in your own context, I’d be interested in hearing how it worked. If you share your experience, I’ll pass it on for others to learn from. Just as the experiences I heard about at the WLU Institute sparked my thinking, your ideas may well benefit others in contexts you can’t even predict.

Tests/Testing Filtering Down (Or Moving Up?)

2006-08-11T16:28:00.000-05:00

A recent article reports that test taking is increasingly being used by companies as a hiring factor. Most of these are assessment tests in which applicants rate themselves on personal questions. Companies then use the results to help them determine who makes it to the interview stage. Testing, you see, has become the raison d’etre in businesses and in schools. Once upon a time, schools were said to lag behind modern business practice. But apparently that lag is gone. Proponents of school testing can now cite businesses’ use of tests and vice versa.

Where does it all end?

Hearing and Hearings

2006-08-10T16:27:00.000-05:00

Congress holds lots of hearings on important matters. And sure, we can watch these on C-SPAN. But sitting in on one, the listener (at least, “this listener”) expects more substance…. This is especially true if the Hearing has a lofty title, such as “How Innovative Educators are Integrating Subject Matter to Improve Student Achievement.” Before attending, one conjures up great expectations about how NCLB has fostered this “new way of teaching” (or perhaps, how it has not).

NCTE recently did a survey of more than 2000 members to get their views on how NCLB had impacted them. (Results of the survey will be released soon.) So I thought the Hearing would provide some testimony that perhaps our survey had missed. While it was clear that all who testified had tapped into the energy and learning potential of their students, to my dismay, I heard nothing that was illustrative of innovative ways of teaching. And none of even the best ideas (and that is stretching it) seemed directly related to NCLB. Where was the connection? Where were the transitions? Where were the cause and effect examples? What could I report? Ahh, but maybe I am thinking too much like an English teacher, or maybe just a careful listener – waiting for/hoping for the point?

How has NCLB fostered new innovative teaching? Tell me in clear identifiable ways.

More news sans reflection

2006-07-18T16:40:00.000-05:00

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education has issued a second draft of its report. Both Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle of Higher Education have stories on it. As with most works in progress, we can see possibilities of where it will go, but we need to wait for that final draft.

The American Council of Learned Societies has announced its new round of grant and fellowship competitions. In addition to its traditional grants and fellowships, ACLS introduced several new programs this year. New programs include doctoral dissertations, increased funding for full professors, and the second year of digital innovation in the humanities.

The National Humanities Alliance reported that the Senate committee is recommending flat funding for the NEH as opposed to a slight increase from the House. Here is the full NHA report on activities so far this summer: https://mail2.cni.org/lists/nha-announce/Message/20186.html.

The other news is that it is hot and humid. That’s not news, that is the chronic condition across the country. Sorry folks, just have to grin and bear it.

News, not reflection

2006-06-27T16:39:00.000-05:00

My impression of a blog is that it is personal—my take on something. But today I am sending a link to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education’s report. This is the first draft of their report, and, remember, it is a first draft. My first drafts are usually quite uneven in tone, and often are more a conversation to me than a conversation to the public. That is why I am hesitant to look too closely at a first draft. But what I do look for is whether it has the major things in it that it needs to have, and my subsequent drafts will refine, tune, sometimes drop major chunks, sometimes realize I am missing major chunks, sometimes add quite a bit of context, and then prepare it for public appearance. I am reading this draft to look for whether they have actually addressed the major issues we need to face in higher education. Here it is. http://insidehighered.com/index.php/content/download/70817/971018/file/Draft%20Report%206.22%20watermarked.pdf

I intend to reflect on what is in here in relation to the higher education landscape I am familiar with to see the connections. That will come later. For now, read and ponder

Puerto Rican Narratives, NCTE and IFC

2006-06-19T09:36:00.000-05:00

Spike Lee introduced most of us to Rosie Perez. She danced with boxing gloves behind a beat and Chuck D’s rhymes. ‘Just do-ing the right thing’: a young Puerto Rican woman representing multi-ethnic Brooklyn. Now with the Independent Film Channel, Rosie Perez offers viewers a similarly engaging personal narrative with rich socio-cultural and historic documentation.

NCTE members and English teachers generally have been in love with Puerto Rican narratives for at least the last ten years. In Atlanta in 2002 Judith Ortiz-Cofer shared her narrative at the opening banquet of the NCTE Annual Convention. She appeared at our convention at least three other times since. Similarly, Esmeralda Santiago spoke at the Baltimore convention the year before and at least three other times. And Victor Villanueva, keynote speaker at the last NCTE Spring conference in Portland shared his narratives at NCTE many times in a variety of venues and roles. In fact, Victor’s book Bootstraps is an enduring classic NCTE publication.

These narratives often have a media component produced implicitly in some cases, and overtly in others with teachers in mind. Annenberg CPB gave us the award-winning The Expanding Canon and Teaching Multicultural Literature in Middle School. These teacher-professional development series feature Santiago and Ortiz-Cofer respectively. Annenberg CPB’s series for high school writing teachers includes Villanueva as an advisor, and Judith Ortiz-Cofer appears on camera as a writing teacher in each episode.

There is no shortage of candid personal or family stories evoking laughter, sighs, or tears in Yo Soy Boricua, Pa’que Tu Lo Sepas! (I’m Boricua, Just So You Know!), directed by Rosie Perez for IFC. However, the richness of the archival images—moving and still, the artifacts, unflinching explorations of linguistic, literary, economic and military themes surrounding Puerto Ricans, their relationship to the United States, and the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States in this documentary sets it apart from the other texts. My friend and mentor Tony Baez nurtured me with many stories of his days with the Young Lords so I was especially intrigued by the treatment of this aspect of Puerto Rican history in the US. Scenes depicting performances from the Nuyorican Poets Café on the Lower East Side of NY offer a unique glimpsed into one of the premier literary movements of our time: spoken word.

Of course this film is not just for teachers. Indeed the general public has much to learn from and enjoy in this documentary. Because this film’s markets most likely include the general audiences, “indy buffs,” or Latino audiences, I highlight its instructional value for high school and college English teachers as a professional development experience and teaching tool. Writers and researchers will also find Yo Soy Boricua interesting and valuable for their creative and scholarly work. Hats off IFC; Thank you Rosie Perez!

Commission Readies to Write

2006-05-31T16:38:00.000-05:00

I attended the first Commission on the Future of Higher Education meeting last October, and watched them struggle with who was representing what, what they were doing, and would it matter. Like a first day of any group work, there was a lot of checking out to see who had the power, what was going to happen, and was this going to work. I wrote several blogs about the Commission work over the next few months (see below), as I saw them gathering all kinds of information—some interesting, some good, some really strange. However, my initial impression was that they would not accomplish what needed to be accomplished because they had the wrong questions. Which were, access, affordability, accountability, and quality. It kind of looked like slam-dunk for NCLB-like testing and cost-cutting.

Last week watching them work, it was like the final days of a good seminar, retreat, or class that had really worked through some issues. The two higher education journals had different takes on the meeting, Inside Higher Ed being more caustic and trying to create an edge while CHE was, in my mind, more to the point. Keep in mind that the purpose of this meeting was to prepare for writing the draft—to get on the table what needed to be on the table, but not to say what the conclusions were yet. What I found good is that the Commissioners were openly struggling with the issues that needed more clarification. They were agreeing to disagree and agreeing to compromise. They were getting the stuff out there in the open for the staff to work through and try to draft a position. What they talked about were the real problems that we do need to address. They were laying the complexities out on the table. It was good sausage making.

The first draft will be circulated to the Commission around the first of August, and the final draft released to the public in mid-September.

So, what does it look like?

It sounds like they would like a report that is quite succinct, that has a few solid, well-documented points, and that significantly forecasts the changes that will need to happen in higher education. Specifically:

On access and preparation, we need to “ensure that every person who can benefit and desires to go to post-secondary education should have a place and it should be affordable.” Naturally this resulted in much discussion about affordability, the financial aid packages, the kinds of education (degree or not—traditional “college” or not), kinds of preparation (academic [seemed to be agreement that preparation for work requires same high school graduation skills as preparation for college], cultural, financial) that will be fleshed out.

Affordability was the natural next topic, and that came down to two questions, the costs the student or payer must provide, and the efficiencies of the institutions. The problem was stated, “Postsecondary education is becoming increasingly unaffordable for greater numbers of Americans, especially low-income and minorities (who represent an increasing percentage of our population/workforce).” They are playing with some recommendations here ranging from “nuking” the present financial aid system to shifting it towards the lower income quartiles to adding to it. At one point, one of the commissioners brought up the idea of a “GI Bill” concept. Consensus was that the current system of 17 programs has got to be fixed. Another recommendation was for removing barriers to other institutional models (Western Governors hovered in the background on this one, as well as the for-profits) to promote efficiencies.

Accountability broke out into two areas as well, one for student learning and one for institutional quality. The first problem statement for accountability is, “Information about institutions of higher education is inadequate or unavailable for a large set of ‘consumers,’ to include students, families, taxpayers, policy makers, employers, contributors, academic institutions, and media.” What it amounts to is that we don’t know what we know, and we certainly are not making it transparent. All the commissioners seemed to agree that getting more data and making it meaningful was important. Charles Vest, former president of MIT, said the academy’s fear of assessment is grounded in using simplistic measures that lead to wrong numbers, give us the wrong answers, and force us to teach to the wrong values. There is a fear that a bureaucratic control of a large assessment process would quash innovation. The point was made several times that we need multiple measures of multiple competencies, one size does not fit all, and we need to, first of all, clarify the outcomes we want—what are we assessing for? What do we mean by student learning? At one point Rick Stephens, the commissioner from Boeing said that what he wanted his engineers to do was think, communicate, relate, collaborate, respect and enjoy diversity—the liberal arts skills. David Ward, from ACE, said that the academy would welcome assessment if we get it right—know what we need to know, use reliable instruments to get what we need, and be open about what it means and how it will be used. Vest concurred and said the academy will buy in if it makes a difference, is meaningful, fits the context, and actually leads to improvement.

The second part of the accountability question dealt with accreditation. The discussion here ranged from, again, nuke it to ignore it. The nuke it part was a question raised—if we are doing good assessment, and it is transparent, do we need it? That argument was countered with the realization that the good assessment that is transparent is not here now, so we still need accreditation. But there was a call for more transparency in the accreditation process, what it means for the institution and for the stakeholders of that institution, and for more rigor in the accreditation so that it means something. At present it really is the foxes guarding the henhouse.

The fourth area that Secretary Spellings had indicated the Commission should explore was Quality. Because that is such a nebulous term—quality for what, to whom, and accountable where, the Commission did work their way through to three areas of focus on quality in higher education: 1) workforce development and meeting labor needs, 2) increasing the supply to address capacity, and 3) innovation. Given the players at the table, one could predict what they wanted to focus on, but they did mull around with a multitude of ideas.

Workforce Development: The problem statement for this area of the report is this: “The global environment requires changes in the US higher education system so that it 1) must be accessible to all groups of people—all economic [read racial and ethnic here as well] groups and all ages, and 2) must be flexible in providing both degree-based and career advancement skills.” Discussion points on this issue came primarily from the captains of industry. Their point was that a high school diploma, even with a good high school education, is simply not enough. Everyone will need some post secondary education. Rick Stephens from Boeing said that we have to ask “Are we teaching students to solve problems and pull information together.” As they all talked about how STEM is important, because that is the innovation for development, they talked about what place the US will play in a global world. Boeing, IBM, and Microsoft all said (and IBM was loudest here) that our forte may not be technical skills, but we are still way ahead in terms of the idea creation and management part of a global economy. If we work now, we can maintain that. They key is not just technical training, it is the critical thinking and communication and collaboration and diversity of our liberal arts education goals, coupled with our scientific and technological creativity that will keep us leading.
Increasing Capacity: Those really embedded in academic culture will rebel at the language here, but this report is being controlled by non-academics—and that isn’t all bad. But it does make some of us a bit uncomfortable. Increasing supply to address capacity is business terminology for we have too many students and too few resources and no way of checking our quality controls. We don’t know where our money is coming from because the sources are drying up. On the other hand, we don’t know where the money is going, because no one can really tell why the costs are escalating. Here is the problem statement they suggested the report work on: “How can we emphasize good learning? The data we have suggests achievement is not good” (apropos studies published the last few years). That translates to a business model that if the data we have suggests we have a problem, we need to look at our capacity to meet our needs. We need to change higher education culture that has been content with students trying to find their own way through it. We have way too much attrition, and we offer virtually no help for students to improve retention, to understand the financial aid picture, to create a culture of college success. We need to work with emerging pedagogies and technologies to improve the efficiencies of the system. Okay, that might be business model language, but we can translate.
Innovation: The problem was succinctly stated as “We are being challenged as never before, and the future is not looking good.” The specific points, or weaknesses, are an obsolete curriculum, adversity to taking risks, expensive tuition, not enough STEM students, and that higher education is out of touch with the needs of the 21st century. In the discussion, the Commissioners brought out that education needs to emphasize more communication, collaboration and relationship building with a strong centering in the liberal arts. Innovation must be turned over to the faculty, as that is where it will happen—faculty need to be encouraged and supported in innovative teaching, scholarship, and cross-disciplinary work. And finally, America must re-establish the fundamental purpose of higher education as a public good, serving all of society.

What we might worry about a bit is that traditional routes to teacher education were touted as insufficient. There is an interesting contradiction here, as in much of the discussion about teacher education programs. Even though most of the good, creative work in teacher education is occurring in higher education institutions, and the call from this Commission and most other reports on education is for creatively studying and applying research on teaching and learning, they distrust the very institutions that are doing the work. The call for alternate routes to teacher certification is loud, but the alternate routes that are touted are quick fixes rather than solid research on teaching and learning.

Where does all this leave us?

It is no secret that there are major problems in higher education. The undergraduate curriculum that was centered on a fairly good agreement of general education courses in the middle of the 20th century has become such a large smorgasbord of courses that it is no longer meaningful. Costs have skyrocketed, and sources of funding are getting scarce. At the same time that education beyond high school is becoming more of a universal necessity, access to higher education, both financial and curricular, is deemed problematic and inequitable. When over 50 percent, and higher than that for some disciplines, of the courses, particularly for beginning students, are taught by a faculty cohort that is not a full-time participant of the institutional culture, the faculty role is shifting. In short, we are going through a major shift in how we operate. The question is whether this commission will make recommendations that will address these problems or not. My initial reaction last fall was that they would not. My reaction last week as I watched them work is that they just might.

Here is what I think they will say. We need more good data to show that what we want to happen is actually happening. We need transparency so we all, the town and the gown, understand what to expect from the institutions and whether they deliver it. We need to be open to and encourage new ways of providing and nurturing education, not just degrees, so that we as a nation are comfortable and profitable in a life of learning.

If the report can indicate what we need to do in light of the above areas, this may help us all re-conceive what needs re-conceptualization to address the major issues facing us. The risk in anything like this is that the Commission report will define too narrowly what the solutions are. I was hopeful in that I heard a lot of language that suggested the Commission saw this as a problem best solved by higher education, not for higher education. But then, I have always been an optimist.

Off to a Great Start: NCTE/IRA’s Literacy Coaching Clearinghousea

2006-05-08T13:15:00.000-05:00

At a session at the International Reading Conference last week Nancy Shanklin, new director of the NCTE/IRA Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse, engaged over fifty people in brainstorming about the clearinghouse’s website and research questions. Participants brainstormed potential users of the website, generating a comprehensive list that included, among others, classroom teachers, literacy coaches, administrators, policy makers, parents, and state education officials. A range of research questions covered such topics as defining essential features of coaching, analyzing the impact of coaching on teacher practice, and describing the effects of changed practice on student learning.

As Shanklin assembles an Advisory Council and a set of fellows to contribute to the establishment of the Center, she is eager to learn what will be most helpful to those who will use the clearinghouse as a source of information and connection with others engaged in the coaching process. cambridge-blog@ncte.orgIf you have suggestions, please respond to this blog. I'll be sure that Nancy receives your ideas.

Recently at the American Educational Research Association, I attended sessions on literacy coaching on behalf of NCTE’s efforts in establishing the clearinghouse. Emily Rogers and Carrie Hung from The Ohio State University reported the dearth of research on what it is that effective literacy coaches do. Their research focused on using an observational rubric with coaches who observed and rated video clips of coaches at work. Basic questions included “How did the coaches analyze teaching?” and “What are literacy coaches’ understandings about quality teaching?” These researchers concluded that (1) Coaches need to lift teachers’ theoretical understandings. (2) Coaches need to be well prepared in the subject matter so they can make decisions on the how, what, and when of teaching,” and “Coaches need a deep theory of literacy learning and knowledge of the teaching standards.”

Three other research/practitioners—Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell, and Emily Rodgers—developed specific rubrics for examining each of the following instructional components: interactive read aloud, shared reading, guided reading, interactive writing, writing workshop, and word study. They concluded from their work that “A many layered rubric offers a look inside the ‘black box’ of instructional approaches, provides concrete language for the professional developer or coach so that practice can be viewed on a continuum, and serves as a ‘map’ for self-reflection on the part of individual teachers.”

David Kerbow and Nicole Pinkard from the University of Chicago presented on “Developing Observational Rubrics for Literacy Coaches: A Tool for Professional Development and Following Teacher Change.” They field tested their rubric with 22 literacy coordinators working with 78 teachers in K-3. Based on an item response theory model, the rubric revealed that “Literacy coaches agree about what they are seeing.” They presented empirical evidence for the construct validity of their rubric and for teacher development.

I mention these three presentations because research is being done on literacy coaching. The problem is that the research is difficult to find and needs to be organized for ready accessibility by people in many roles who can benefit from the research findings. And, that’s one main function of the Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse.

NCTE members will be able in the months ahead to contribute to and to benefit from the clearinghouse. Be on the lookout for the website to be up and running by the end of August. Also as you plan your time at the 2006 NCTE Convention, watch for the workshop that Nancy Shanklin will coordinate on literacy coaching. Beware that her excitement about this subject is catching! You’re likely to go away from the workshop more knowledgable and more enthused than ever about the benefits of effective literacy coaching.

Serendipity and Intentionality: Both are Important

2006-04-12T13:15:00.000-05:00

As a WASC commissioner, that is a member of the body that accredits colleges and universities in California and several other locales, I sat today beside one of the California State University campus presidents whom I've known from other contexts. Serendipitously, I learned during our conversation that he sits on the commission investigating the effects of NCLB.

Opportunely, I was able to tell him about the outpouring of teacher voices, in well reasoned statements, that came when NCTE last week asked for teacher responses to the influence of NCLB on their teaching and their students' learning. When he mentioned that the commission is hearing that some subjects are being neglected in favor of those subjects tested, I was able to tell him that English teachers know a great deal about how to incorporate literacy instruction in the teaching of other subjects. When I asked him how best to supply him and his commission colleagues with evidence from our NCTE members, he replied, "Put it in the form of data." I heard that as an invitation to quantify the numbers of teachers identifying various critical issues about NCLB for consideration by the commission.

I recount this happenstance opportunity to influence one policymaker's thinking because all of us must take any opportunity we have to explain the effects of NCLB on teaching and learning. But, we can't leave this important task to happenstance. NCTE members have been encouraged right now to talk with legislators while they are in their home districts, prime time for legislators to be influenced by their constituents. NCTE has an upcoming Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C., where members can be informed about ways to talk with and influence legislators on the Hill---and then do that talking and influencing. Each of us can think of other opportunities in our own setting to supply evidence, both quantitative and qualitative, to those who have the power to lobby for change or to change features of NCLB that detract from rather than enhance learning. We must all take advantage of serendipitous occasions and create intentional occasions to make our voices as teachers heard.

The NCTE Legislative Platform

2006-04-05T09:39:00.000-05:00

Establishment of an NCTE DC-area office last summer was only a first step towards expanding our organization’s influence on policies shaping literacy education. Over the past few months, the executive committee has taken a vital next step by carefully researching pending legislation, hosting hearings with key congressional aides, drafting, and approving a legislative platform. The platform will guide on-going work at the national and local levels to inform legislators regarding measures that can truly support, not inhibit, high quality teaching and student learning.

Building the Platform

Last April, a group of NCTE officers and staff leaders met with the government relations staff of the American Association of School Administrators, widely recognized as one of the most effective education groups in Washington DC. Bruce Hunter, their Director of Government Relations, described the process that they use to establish an annual legislative agenda. It involved inviting AASA executive committee members to a series of briefings and working sessions in Washington DC each winter to gather information, focus on the most critical issues to AASA members, and establish core positions for the organization. They invited experts and legislators from both parties to brief them, took several days to analyze and debate positions, then drafted a document that established positions on matters in which their members had both expertise and concern. Subsequently, they developed a field network to offer expert testimony on the issues, and to mobilize their membership to generate communications as needed to inform the legislative process.

After evaluating the AASA experience and practices of other leading education groups, the executive committee appropriated funds for members of the government relations subcommittee and NCTE Officers to come to Washington DC in late January to draft a first-ever NCTE legislative platform. In preparation for the meeting, the NCTE Federal Relations Director (Sandra Gibbs) and our Legislative Consultant (Ellin Nolan) scheduled a series of meetings at the Longworth Building with legislative staffers from the Senate HELP committee and the House Education and the Workforce Committee. They offered a full day of testimony and data about the future of matters like the Higher Education Act, No Child Left Behind Reauthorization, and emerging federal programs relating to high school reform and the American Competitiveness Initiative.

NCTE leaders then spent the better part of the next two days sifting the testimony and information, and drafting a platform document for consideration by the full executive committee in February. Eventually, two documents were passed—a more detailed, technical document for staff to use to advise Congress about specific legislative provisions, and a more thematic document for use with public audiences.

Platform Highlights

The legislative platform incorporates various NCTE resolutions and guidelines, and weaves them into a series of recommendations to Congress. While consistent, progressive themes are found throughout the document, it draws special attention to matters of immediate policy concern at different scholastic levels and in areas where we have greatest expertise (notably, teacher preparation, professional development, and research). Here’s a selection:

Early learning recommendations call for a full, independent, study of Reading First to evaluate its long term effects and overall effectiveness. A restoration of full funding for Head Start is singled out for federal action.

General K-12 recommendations focus on decreasing the emphasis on high stakes tests while investing in assessments that advance, not merely measure, student learning. Further exploration of “growth models” that incorporate longer term evaluations of student cohorts is advocated, as is greater support for English language learners, teachers in high-needs schools, and well-informed literacy coaches.

Teacher preparation recommendations focus on the need for legislation to support teacher learning about subject matter content and pedagogy. It warns federal investment in only a narrow range of research methodologies or programs aligned solely with this research. It calls for full integration of new technologies in teacher preparation, and establishment of program assessments based on consistent, long-term data drawn from students who have completed teacher preparation study, rather than students who have completed other degrees.

Professional development, and access to it, is a major focus throughout the document. The emphasis in the NCTE Platform is on support for career-long professional development that is designed to meet local challenges. Measures that expand access to mentors and literacy coaches are advocated, as is more funding for programs that promote the integration of technology and that leverage partnerships between universities, school systems, businesses, and non-profit organizations.

Taking Action

To bring our platform and related issues to the attention of key policymakers, two major undertakings are scheduled for April. During the latter half of the month, a series of email invitations to schedule appointments with Congressional Representatives in their home offices will be sent to NCTE member activists. It will include links to our platform, supporting research briefs, and logistical advice on scheduling and making the meeting count. For those who want to meet key office-holders in Washington DC, we are hosting English Language Arts Advocacy Day on April 27. The day will begin with briefing from Congressional Aides, NCTE staff members, and our legislative consultant (Ellin Nolan). In the afternoon, participants will be invited to share their perspectives on literacy education issues through meetings with their Congressional Representatives and Senators.

What’s Next

As we move ahead, members can expect to find more frequent briefings on the Squire Policy Research Office web pages and more frequent calls to action through the emailed action alerts and announcements in the NCTE Inbox. This is a critical period in the history of our organization and a time of opportunity for the larger literacy education community. We have the experience, research base, and energy needed to improve education legislation and learning outcomes in English language arts classrooms. Our challenge today is to develop the grassroots organizational capacity to bring our expertise and carefully-considered messages to policy makers. With the active participation of members at local and national levels, we can resist one-size fits all “solutions” and make a positive difference for teachers, students, and their families.

MySpace

2006-03-23T09:35:00.000-06:00

High School tensions often run high. Posturing, profanity, put downs—racism…When my students wandered into my room distraught, angry, stressed or otherwise defeated I always offered an ear, but sometimes I needed to give a bit of heart and mind. When a student came to express a sense of injustice at administration I put them in front of the computer and allowed them to compose and send an email from my account to the principal, dean of students, athletic director etc. Writing their thoughts via email enabled them to calm down, clarify their concern and address an authentic and appropriate audience. The issue under consideration was not always taken up formally; often it was enough simply to express emotion. And it allowed for an impromptu mini-lesson on style and grammar.

Last night I read a public comment from my son on his MySpace page. Dan is in the army and currently deployed in Iraq. He was angry at supervisors who felt that although he was doing well at his particular job and completing work in record time, when finished he and his colleagues were too casual with their remaining clock-time. His superior officers felt that he and his colleagues were not setting a good visual example for other soldiers. His anger was real and he expressed it with precision. He simply wanted to be judged on the work, not what he did when the task was complete.

While I was attentive to his concern, I was actually interested in the use of the online complaint, a well-written rant about a personal—or personnel—situation. It reminded me a bit of the above scenario with my high school students. As with my students, the substance of the fuming could have been addressed inappropriately to one of those superior officers causing him more than extra push ups; soldiers are “smoked” more intensely during war-time in a war zone. Instead, he turned to members of his online community, known and unknown to assuage his feelings.

MySpace has particular features whereby the writer can post an icon that expresses his or her mood at the time of writing (creative, confused, angry etc.). The icons serve as a kind of advanced organizer. What a way to crystallize feelings prior to articulation. Further, like blogs readers can post comments immediately to the writer’s commentary offering the possibility of immediate and authentic feedback.

There are many features of MySpace that both enable multimodal literacy and at the same time raise concerns for parents, caretakers and teachers. I encourage educators to explore possible pedagogical uses of MySpace. Educational researchers can explore the rich self-motivated multimodal literacy engaged through this online tool.

Strange Fruit Planted in High School Classrooms

2006-02-06T09:34:00.000-06:00

Some time ago Tracy Holder, Producer of the documentary Joe Papp in Five Acts, handed me a copy of Strange Fruit a documentary of that song made famous by Billie Holiday. With apologies to the producer, Joel Katz—who I never actually met—I must admit that I didn’t look at the film until recently. Even after touring the exhibit Without Sanctuary at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta after the NCTE Annual convention a few years back, the film remained on my bookshelf. Without Sanctuary exhibited photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs of African American lynchings. The weight of historic pathologies come down hard and heavy at the exhibit and readers of this post should beware that this grotesque pathology is equally graphic on the web site link noted above. But it is a necessary exercise in visual literacy.

I took a look at the film for the first time with some of my teacher education students last spring and then again this past Saturday with another group of students. While the film does not avoid the horror of history, the narrative of the song is the focus as opposed to lynching specifically. English teachers should note that the song “Strange Fruit” was written by Abel Meeropol, a high school English Teacher who taught in the Bronx while writing a number of songs, plays and film scripts.

This is however more than an inspiration to the range of influence possible from our profession. It is also a story of interracial education and activism. The film recounts not only that this teacher, a Jewish-American, wrote the song, but also that he and his wife later adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their execution. Further, the adoption was facilitated by none other then W. E. B. DuBois, author of the American Literature Classic The Souls of Black Folk, available in full text online at the Electronic Text center, of the University of Virginia Library.

My students loved this film and they plan on incorporating it into their curriculum. Hats off to the producers and thanks Tracy for putting the film in my hands. The film ends at the same high school where Meeropol taught, as an English teacher explores the lyrics of the song with his multiracial classroom. The class explores literary devices such as metaphor, tone, and allusion. They also explore history and contemporary events. This is educational media at its best. While it is among other things an exploration of literary history born in the classroom, it returns to the classroom to look at curriculum and instruction. This blending of education, electronic media, art and literature was broadcast on PBS but it is available through California Newsreel.

What is the Real Cost of Education?

2005-12-22T16:37:00.000-06:00

In my last blog (see below), I began a commentary on Daniel Hamermesh’s report to the US Department of Education Commission on the Future of Higher Education. My comment in that blog was on the economic benefit of a general education rather than vocational training. In this blog I would like to address issues of cost on student attendance.

Let’s start with an a priori assumption: It is the desire of the Commission to recommend solutions that provide access and affordability to all American citizens to attend an institution of higher education and achieve the educational goals they desire.

When discussing cost, I need to clarify what cost I mean. There is, of course, the financial cost to society to create the infrastructure of institutions to provide access. This has been addressed over the past century and a half through national policy. The United States built an infrastructure of higher education institutions that provides the basics of higher education in almost every section of the country. The Morrell Act and system of land-grant institutions along with the state normal schools were designed to provide access and affordability. In the middle of the twentieth century, the community college movement continued that policy with a huge network of colleges. Add to that the network of private institutions, and we have a large network of higher education institutions. Only the most remote citizens do not have physical access to a college. And, if they have the internet, they have access through electronics to a college curriculum.

The issue of cost I want to reflect on is the cost to the student. Here, again, we can look to the support developed by our society in the concept of financial aid. Starting with the GI Bill that became Pell grants that became loans, we have provided a network of financial aid structures to provide financial support for college students. The question is whether or not this will help us achieve the assumption mentioned above. Does our financial aid policy, or the suggested revisions to it, really help provide financial support that will extend higher educational opportunity to all our citizens?

After reading Hamermesh’s report, I am inclined to question whether it will.

The first thing we need to consider is the cost, to the student, of a college education. There are two costs, the tuition, fees, and associated costs for attending an institution, and what Hamermesh calls the “opportunity cost” of attending college. This is the income the student foregoes while attending college. In his calculations, the opportunity cost of a year of education in 2004 for a student population in the 18-24 age bracket was $10,000 per year. If students receive no financial aid and no subsidies, the cost of a year of higher education is quite high. So, subsidizing tuition will not make a big difference in the demand for higher education. The rationale is that reducing tuition and fees still leaves the overall cost (opportunity cost plus associated educational costs) quite high.

The next thing to consider is that the cost of tuition has not dampened college enrollments. In other words, using a simple “what the market will bear” theory of pricing education, the market does not respond negatively to higher costs—overall. Offering financial aid slightly increases the enrollment and completion rates, but, in economic terms, not enough to warrant increasing the overall subsidies. Even a generous grant program “cannot reduce the price of attending college by enough to generate large increases in enrollment. In short, offering further subsidies to college attendance, or cutting back on existing subsidies, is unlikely to alter greatly the average number of students attending and completing higher education” (6) [emphasis mine]. Hamermesh is using good economics logic. Our current subsidy program, even if amplified, is not the silver bullet.

I emphasized part of that last quote. Because averages aggregate individuals and groups. And that is the point. Who are the people that make up the average, and what happens when we disaggregate? Part of the aggregate is the “traditional” American college student population—students from upper and middle income groups for whom a college education is a foregone conclusion, and this group is willing to take out the necessary loans to achieve that end. This group is still the large majority of college students. The other part of the aggregate comprises the students from low-and middle-income backgrounds for whom college is not a foregone conclusion, but requires a serious decision to leap some hurdles. Financial debt for college is not a high priority for this cohort. According to Hamermesh, “cutting public subsidies . . . would especially deter potential students from lower-income families”(7). This is particularly noticeable in the area of student loans. We do know that low- to middle-income students are much less likely to incur large debt to attend college.

What this means is that the most common answers we have heard for addressing the cost to the student of higher education will not provide better access for all potential college students. One suggestion has been vouchers, allowing students to attend whatever college they want to attend. If the vouchers applied to private institutions as well as public, as our current financial aid does, a large block of that aid would go to students at private institutions, therefore not providing as much money for low- and middle-income students, who primarily attend the lower cost public institution near where they live.

Another suggestion is privatization. The extreme of this is the private, for-profit and proprietary institutions, but it also includes the non-profits. This limits access in terms of location. Our policy established through land-grant, normal, and community colleges has created a pretty universal network of available colleges. These were public investments to provide higher education to a broader and broader audience. Again, Hamermesh: “Any policy that especially reduces access to college for children from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution will exacerbate the already strong trends toward greater income inequality, both within and across generations”(7).

It is important to remember that any public action establishes policy. For instance, our shift from grants to loans for higher education, while saying on one hand that the person who benefits from the education should ultimately pay for it, also disenfranchises those people for whom a loan is not an option, either because of lack of credit or because their cultural values can not comprehend incurring that kind of debt. In other words, actions result in policy that privileges or disenfranchises different parts of our society.

What we have now is a policy that privileges the already privileged and limits the low- and middle-income students. If what we have is not working to make higher education accessible and affordable for all our citizens, what will work? I don’t have the answer, but we can begin by speaking up about what we value and what we want in higher education. We can also look at models of providing money for both the direct and opportunity costs based on need. One model Hamermesh points to is the Australian program. There they developed an income-contingent loan repayment plan that provides substantial tuition/fees “waivers subject to their being paid back through additional future tax payments that depended on the student’s subsequent earnings” (9). This may not be our answer, but we need to creatively think about solutions that provide the money where it is needed. We need to ensure that the Commission and policy makers do not take an easy out that provides a seemingly helpful response when evidence shows that, in the long run, we will not serve our citizens with the higher education they as individuals and we as society need.

More Musings on the Commission on the Future of Higher Education

2005-12-21T16:36:00.000-06:00

When the Department of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education met in Nashville last week, most of the stories covering the two-day event focused on high profile announcements and attendees. The chair of the Commission, Charles Miller, was quoted in several sources about testing college students (http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-12-07-college-testing_x.htm, http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/12/2005120902n.htm, http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/09/commission). Senator Lamar Alexander, former Secretary of Education, also got good press coverage (http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/12/2005121201n.htm, http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/12/commission). In his remarks, Alexander calls for 1) supporting research in our institutions, 2) appoint a lead advisor to coordinate US higher education, 3) deregulation of higher education, and 4) overhaul Medicaid to free states to fund higher education.

Amidst all the high profile comments and reports, the one that stands out to me is a report by Daniel S. Hamermesh of the University of Texas at Austin. He is the Edward Everett Hale Centennial Professor of Economics; Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, and Program Director, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA). His report, “Four Questions on Labor Economics of Higher Education,” quietly, and in academic economics language, sets the value of higher education for both the students and the society—the private and the public good.

My fear is that his report will be ignored because it actually sets a framework for improving higher education. He frames his points with four questions: 1) How much higher education should there be? 2) What kind of higher education—general vs. “vocational”? 3) What are the disincentive effects of prices on college attendance and completion? And 4) How to fund higher education, public vs. private?

He is an economist, so he gives economics answers. And that is good, particularly from my point of view. The quick answer to the first question is that the payoff is better for students and the public now than in the 1970’s. The second, third, and fourth questions are more interesting to me, however, and I will talk about each in separate blogs, beginning with question two today.

II. What Kind of Higher Education—General vs. “Vocational”? is Hamersmesh’s title to this section of his report. As a person who spent over 30 years in a community college, and as a person raised with the dictum that I should have a major that gives me job options to fall back on, and as a person who still has ringing in his ears his father’s statement on hearing that I had switched majors from math to English, “Well, maybe you can get into administration someday,” I have always been bedeviled by that question. What is the practicality of a liberal arts education? What value do we find in a general education? My answer has always been that the best education is a general education—if we can learn in multiple modes, we can learn the nitty-gritty of our job demands.

Hamermesh reinforces that strongly with his economics study of the kinds of education we need. Here is what he says, “We know from substantial evidence from the past 15 years (Berman et al, 1998) that technology and skill are complementary—there is a greater demand for generally skilled workers in those companies and industries where technology is changing more rapidly” (4). Well, how about that. This is kind of like teaching them to fish rather than giving them a trout. He goes on to say, “Which curricula [vocational or general] are more likely to stimulate technological advances is unclear; but it is clear that a concentration solely on vocationally-related education will narrow the channels along which new technology might be developed and in the end retard economic growth” (5). [Emphasis mine.]

It sounds to me that the best education in the long run is a general education. Yes, we need the tools of our trades, but we need to know how to use the tools generally rather than in specialized applications. That changes, and changes rapidly. I have in this paper what I have always wanted, an economics answer to the age-old question, should I pursue job training or general education. As a humanist, I have always favored the latter for its intellectual and aesthetic reward. Now we have an economist demonstrating an economic reward.

Because commissions are established out of the particular pique of the moment, they usually produce a short-term answer. In this case, we can hope that, below the radar screen of media attention, the commission heard Hamermesh’s report. Not only that they heard it, but that they realize the chance they have to address the real needs of higher education.

Ninth Grade: Precipice or Springboard?

2005-12-14T13:14:00.000-06:00

In the December 13th Washington Post, writer Jay Mathews focuses on the ninth grade, what he calls the precipice or the springboard in education. The full-page analysis of what is known about 14-year-olds highlights views of developmental psychologists and educators who describe from research and from practice ninth graders from a range of schools and home contexts. See which of these match your experience.

They enjoy research and putting together research reports.

They like to discuss current events, either formally or informally.

They complain about the volume of homework but often secretly enjoy challenge and their ability to meet teacher demands.

They often say the work is too easy when they find it plenty challenging.

When they complain about work as “boring,” that translates as, “I really don’t understand this stuff.”

They function well in small (8-10-person) discussion groups.

They like to improve work if given the chance to revise.

The article features researchers, i.e. Walter Haney, a Boston College education professor who investigates why ninth-graders are held back and eventually drop out, and teachers and administrators, i.e. the principals and teachers at Minnie Howard School, where classes of no more than 15 students meet daily with a teacher or other professional to discuss their lives based on individual achievement plans they wrote at the beginning of the year.

I write about this article because it has the potential to start discussions among readers about what can really work to keep adolescents engaged in their learning, For example, did you find yourself wanting to talk back about the points above that either did or didn’t ring true to you? But, I am also impressed by what The Washington Post is doing to inform the public about positive actions addressing adolescent needs while not ignoring the formidable challenges. So much negative publicity feeds the angst based on tests, without including the complexity of the challenges and the ways in which creative educators are addressing that complexity, by research that informs practice and practice that informs research.

What if local newspapers published informed reports like this one to spark and reframe discussions about education in communities that are grappling with how to keep adolescents in school? Jay Mathews, who spoke at NCTE this year, is a hero in my eyes: he cares enough about education to write in-depth accounts of what does and could happen in schools. Could you supply to your local paper material for education writers who perhaps have less commitment, time, or resources than Mathews to research and write about education in your own community? You could use materials from NCTE that appear in the In Box to situate your report about effective practices used by you and your colleagues.

Richard Pryor: A Literary Life

2005-12-14T09:31:00.000-06:00

It makes sense that the general media would pause to note Richard Pryor’s parting. But why should English language arts teachers of all levels and college humanities and composition professors particularly note Pryor’s passing?

Richard Pryor was a literary artist strongly influenced by the Black Arts Movement. We might note this in terms of his style, even going as far to say that he was a Black Arts Movement comedian. Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle tribute to Pryor noted that after a crisis of consciousness causing him to leave the stage during a Las Vegas performance, Pryor moved to Berkeley. Specifically, he hung out with Ishmael Reed, notable Black Arts Movement luminary. I called Reed this morning to ask him about his relationship with Pryor.

“We tried to keep him out of Hollywood,” Reed said. “We made his comedy political. Pryor was a brilliant man even with his dark side. He was reading my book Yellow Back Radio Broke Down and later used the content as inspiration in co-writing Blazing Saddles with Mel Brooks.” New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt says Yellow Back Radio Broke Down “is a traditional revenge Western shot full of holes and stood on its head.” Reed’s remarks about Pryor’s work with his novel sounds like a potential writing or research assignment to me!

While Ishmael Reed has often been likened to Mark Twain, in 1998, "Richard Pryor was selected as the first recipient of the new Mark Twain Prize for Humor, because as a stand-up comic, writer, and actor, he struck a chord, and a nerve, with America, forcing it to look at large social questions of race and the more tragicomic aspects of the human condition. Though uncompromising in his wit, Pryor, like Twain, projects a generosity of spirit that unites us. They were both trenchant social critics who spoke the truth, however outrageous." (http://www.kennedycenter.org/programs/specialevents/marktwain/)

Richard Pryor even appeared on Sesame Street exploring emotions--happy, sad, scared and mad. Ironic?! Not really. Pryor put his life on stage and on screen at every turn. Pryor engaged in a deeper emotional exploration with kids in the film he co-produced with William Greaves, Bustin’ Loose. In the film, Pryor and co-star Cicely Tyson rescue a group of orphaned ELD kids with various ethnic and racial backgrounds in an Odessey from Philadelphia to a farm in Oregon on a broken down school bus. Like any good writer, artist, or teacher Pryor infused everything he did with his autobiography. Not his formal autobiography Pryor Convictions and other Life Sentences, written in the last few years, rather his autobiography in a thematic sense--immediate, lived, and uncensored.

Beyond the literary significance of Pryor’s life and art for English language arts educators, this passing or rather the reflection brought about by this passing, offers an opportunity to note the rich possibilities for using popular culture in the classroom as generative, inter-textual opportunities for inquiry bringing all of the language arts to bear in a formal academic presentation or production.

A New Occasion for Educating Your Principal

2005-12-06T13:13:00.000-06:00

Teachers in middle grades and high school have a new, special opportunity to engage principals in dialogue about how to improve adolescent literacy. The National Association of Secondary School Principals has published Creating a Culture of Literacy: A Guide for Middle and High School Principals. Because of generous funding from the Gates Foundation, a copy of the guide has been sent to every middle school high school principal in the country.

As we know, however, this publication will mean nothing if it is not read. The NASSP itself recognizes this point: the conclusion says to principals about the material, “Those of you reading this have two choices: put it on the shelf, or begin to act upon it.” Because principals are so busy, often with necessary administrative matters, I think that they will need assistance “to act upon it.” And, that’s where NCTE members come in.

To garner the understanding of and support for what it takes to engage adolescents in learning, you may want to engage in conversation with your principal about the contents of Creating a Culture of Literacy. Chapters in the very readable publication include a focus on leadership, a summary of what is known about adolescent literacy, a positive way of using assessment, the essential ingredients of a literacy program, and ways to meet needs of all students. Appendices offer templates for capacity surveys, a literacy team planning guide, an improvement action plan, and progress monitoring. A literacy bibliography points to other materials that may be useful. The publication is available online for downloading: http://www.nassp.org/s_nassp/sec_news.asp?CID=1&DID=52936.

You will know best how to enter into the conversation in the context of your school and which parts of the publication can spur discussion and action that will benefit your culture. This new publication offers an up-to-date common reading for administrators and teachers. Consider taking advantage of the moment.

Formative Assessment at the Forefront

2005-10-20T13:12:00.000-05:00

Last week on behalf of NCTE I attended the ETS Invitational Assessment Conference. I came away heartened by the emphasis of the presentations. The good news is that the focus was squarely on formative assessment, in particular on diagnostic formative assessment.

Formative assessment seeks to find how students are progressing toward learning goals. Diagnostic formative assessment adds the feature of suggesting what needs next to be done by teacher and student to improve that progress. Intelligent systems, for example, are being developed for physics and mathematics to guide students who approach a problem in an ineffective way to use an alternative strategy. More than one speaker cautioned about distinguishing between commercial assessments that claim to be formative but offer only accountability uses, such as for benchmarking, and formative assessments that supply useable information for teaching and learning.

I thought during the conference about the multiple ways that teachers of English use diagnostic assessment all the time, even if we do not use that label. The issue, however, is that the evidence of that diagnostic assessment and of its effects on learning is sometimes implicit rather than explicit and sometimes not traced so that teachers can make claims about the impact of their pedagogies. We have also not yet devised ways in which teacher diagnostic assessment can be scaled for systematic use, with documented results, for public understanding and use in accountability decisions.

As NCTE focuses in the coming year on teacher professional development, teachers will be able to make more visible the ways in which they develop their pedagogical expertise over time. Teachers will be able to document how certain professional development activities contribute to their practice and the impact of that practice on student learning.

I hope that some teachers will choose to document the diagnostic formative assessment practices that they use. For example, if a middle grades teacher used the ReadWriteThink lesson entitled “Reciprocal Revision: Making Peer Feedback Meaningful,” she could trace how peer comments pointed to changes that writers then chose to make in actual pieces of student writing. Students who learn through effective teaching how to ask good questions and make useful comments about writing affirm the pedagogy of peer review.

The issue then becomes documenting the collective effectiveness of this diagnostic practice so that it can be part of the wider teacher capacity building agenda and one aspect of the way that teacher effectiveness and student learning outcomes are assessed. Summative assessments used for accountability purposes need alternatives that are established, documented, and made public in a systematic way. NCTE members may over time become committed to providing knowledge about their diagnostic assessment practices first for the purpose of improved learning in individual classrooms and then for collective action, including influencing the future of both formative and summative assessment. We start where we are, individually in our classrooms, but I believe that we need to continue collectively to influence policies about assessment and accountability.

Back to the Future (of Higher Education)

2005-10-19T16:34:00.000-05:00

A little less than a month ago, I wrote a blog on the newly appointed Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The Commission had its first meeting this week (October 17, 2005). It was an interesting moment. Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education filed reports. The length and depth of their reports might indicate their respective sense of the value of the Commission.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings historicized the event by calling up the major federal drivers of higher education, The Morrell Act under Lincoln, the GI Bill under Roosevelt, the National Defense Education Act under Eisenhower, and the Higher Education Act under Johnson. Each of these acts drove higher education forward, and her invoking them suggested that the outcome of the current Commission’s work may result in another landmark action.

She, and other members of the Commission, also pointed to the exigency. United States Higher Education is not the all-out leader it used to be. With other countries development of higher education venues, we are not attracting as large a percentage of foreign graduate students as we used to. Major companies (some represented on the Commission) are going to other countries for their engineers, chemists, and other scientists. And we know that technical support is already outsourced to other countries.

Four areas were emphasized for the Commission’s study; accessibility, affordability, accountability, and quality. Several members of the Commission praised those choices. So, let’s historicize them. The Morrell Act, the GI Bill, and the Higher Education Act all addressed the issues of accessibility and affordability. The first by creating the system of land-grant institutions and the second and third by giving aid to students. The NDEA impacted quality by developing the research and development infrastructure. None of the previous major federal acts has addressed accountability.

Charles Miller, the chair of the Commission, said in his initial appointment that his middle name is “accountability.” Are we seeing a pattern here? If so, we need to question accountable for what and to whom. That will be decided by the Commissioners. Microsoft, IBM, and Boeing are at the table. Non-traditional higher education in the form of Kaplan and Western Governor’s University are present. Traditional institutional types are represented, often through emeritus presidents, with one current president of a community college. Disciplinary backgrounds in engineering, economics, and humanities are here. Voices promoting access for all students are part of the Commission. Ex-officio members come from Department of Energy, Department of Labor, Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, and Department of Education.

Who isn’t here? Arts, social sciences, NEH or NEA, literacy, faculty—particularly in light of the shift from full-time tenured to large numbers of contingent faculty.

Accountable for what and to whom? Is this addressing a short-term high tech and aerospace need? Or is it going to address the major shifts occurring in higher education. What, after all, is the purpose of higher education for this country.

A message I got from this first meeting is that this is the moment in time when we must revitalize United States Higher Education. I repeat, for what end and to whose benefit? Follow the Commission’s work on their Web site

Seamless content: The Future of Learning Today

2005-10-19T09:30:00.000-05:00

This past June I enjoyed participating on two panels at the Alliance for a Media Literate America conference in San Francisco. The primary panel that I enjoyed included Tesa Jolles of the Center for Media Literacy and Ken Kay of Infotech Strategies, and, more importantly, The Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Part of Ken’s presentation explored the ICT Literacy Maps developed by NCTE, NCTM, NSTA and others. Specifically, Ken noted that the ICT Literacy Map for geography includes knowledge in the use of global positioning devices. Ken says that the crafters of this ICT Literacy Map believe that there will be no geography in the 21st Century without such devices. Later, in a conversation with P. David Pearson, Dean of the College of Education at UC Berkeley, we explored the instructional implications for geography that incorporates historical narratives about specific locations.

While the maps have clear disciplinary boundaries, there is a progressive, interdisciplinary thread running through them that is easily discernable. Enter Hewlett Packard: According to an article in the business section of the October 11 San Francisco Chronicle written by Benjamin Pimentel, HP has advanced this technology in such a way as to create an interdisciplinary tool bridging geography, history, art, and literature. The new device not only tracks your location, but narrates your movement. As you walk and experience new views—parks, murals, buildings or other landmarks—voices of local artists, writers, public servants, or private citizens explain the surroundings. Further, the technology is exploring ways for anyone to upload a narrative about a particular location for others with the device to experience.

How would this change our fieldtrips? Can you imagine having students—at whatever grade level—researching some aspect of a community near the school, walking through the actual location while listening to the device, and later uploading their own narratives that serve as an assessment “product” of their learning about the experience, specific content from multiple subjects or a single subject, and use of the technology ?! I am excited about the possibilities of such a device. Ideally, HP will engage the education community not just for potential pedagogical considerations, but also economics to ensure broad availability of such a tool in schools.

On Outsourced Grading

2005-09-23T16:34:00.000-05:00

The Inside Higher Education story on outsourced grading has started a lot of comments thrown back and forth about the value of outsourced grading of student papers. I spent over 35 years in English and English studies classrooms—most of that time with a heavy load of composition courses. When I left the classroom to take a cushy office job, the thing I missed most was reading student papers. When I would mention this to colleagues, most of whom were still in the classroom, they would look askance until I would say, “I miss reading student papers, but I don’t miss the stacks of papers that I had to get back to students by tomorrow morning.” And then they would see what I meant. But even the stacks were fun. Yes, we all learn how to pace ourselves so that we can read a stack in the time our job demands, but the pleasure and privilege of working with another person as they struggle to voice something profound to them is the center of teaching composition. And it is what makes for good composition instruction.

The threads of discussion following the story show that most people not intimately involved with teaching composition do not understand, as we do, that assessment is not grading, that assessment is how we help our students improve—it is coaching.

Good teaching, as in good coaching, only works when there is a continual response, a continual communication, between student and teacher. A teacher separated from responding to student work is like a coach trying to improve performance without seeing the performance or giving feedback.

We need to clarify to other academics, to our administrators, and to the public that we do not grade papers. We respond to our students’ work. Yes, in the process, we make judgments that we share with our students, and we use writing assessment as a way of determining value in addition to improving work, but the heart and soul of composition instruction (and it should be of all instruction) is the person-to-person response of the teacher to the student. Students do not improve their writing skills through error counting, but they do through good assessment that is more often in the frame of a response than a grade.

The NCTE framing statement on assessment and the CCCC statement of assessment of writing make that abundantly clear. Print them and use them on your campus to help your campus community understand that improving student writing will not happen with outsourced grading. And that is the real bottom line. No education program is economically sound if it does not foster student improvement.

The Future of Higher Education

2005-09-21T16:32:00.000-05:00

That was the headline for the lead story in Inside Education yesterday. Many of us have been nervously waiting for the intensity of attention focused on K-12 to turn to higher ed. The other shoe has fallen. The story, carried in both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Education is about the new commission that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has just announced.

Ms. Spellings made the announcement at a speech at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte on Monday. Calling the commission “A National Dialogue: The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education,” the purpose is to ”develop a comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education.” The commission will specifically focus on rising enrollments, declining affordability, and colleges’ role in America’s global competitiveness.

The Commission will hold its first meeting in Washington, DC in October followed by four others around the country.

So, is this good news or bad news? It is good news in that we will get some information about the relationship between rising costs and rising enrollments. We might also find out something more about our global competitiveness. But a question that niggles at me is whether or not we will get substantive information about the shifting infrastructure of higher education. Will we really tackle such issues as the changing financial structure, the shifting roles for faculty, the revitalization of undergraduate learning—all issues that we have talked about as serious problems for higher education? Or will the commission only superficially look at higher education? Dodge the bullet, so to speak. And, perhaps more important, which is better?

Acting on What We Know

2005-09-19T13:11:00.000-05:00

I was filled with horror at the televised pictures of hurricane victims, both dead and alive. At first, I was appalled at claims by some people that the catastrophe of inadequate response to need was racially based. But, I’ve come to accept with shame that a major reason so many people remained in their homes was that they didn’t have the money to get out. And, poverty brings us back to race.

In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol, who earlier awoke my consciousness in his searing book about schools in East St. Louis, again exposes what he calls de facto segregation in urban school systems. His descriptions of physical conditions of schools echo what I read each fall in Washington as schools reopen: schools are “buildings where ceilings leak, rats scurry, and toilets don’t flush.” Citing data about significant gaps between per-pupil spending in districts that serve predominantly white students and predominantly students of color, Kozol contends that current conditions expand the “vast divide between two separate worlds of future cognitive activity, political sagacity, social health and economic status, and the capability of children of minorities to thrive.” A Washington Post review on September 4, 2005 applauds Kozol’s book because it “firmly grounds school-reform issues in the thorny context of race and concludes that the nation has failed to deliver the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.”

Another book I’m reading right now is the NCTE publication Teachers Organizing for Change: Making Literacy Learning Everybody’s Business by Cathy Fleischer. Cathy’s book makes sense to me on so many counts, but especially when she suggests that teacher-researchers, who constitute so many NCTE members, need to become teacher-organizers so that they can communicate their understandings to their communities. This spread of information, according to Cathy, “transforms knowledge into language and formats that are appealing and understandable to others who are not in the field—centering that knowledge on the real lives of students.” And, this knowledge must lead to change where it is needed.

The pictures from New Orleans and the stories of victims have spurred many Americans to action, in personal and community acts of kindness and in calls for political changes to be sure delayed response to crisis never happens again. The visual and the narrative are powerful influences that have appeal and can lead to understanding and action based on the real lives of individuals and communities. But, in this situation we are being reactive.

How can we as teachers present images and tell stories that will evoke public action about the horrific conditions of schools in many urban neighborhoods? Are we able to link our images and stories to the underlying reality of the place of poverty and race in creating the state of urban schools? How much responsibility are we who don’t teach in urban schools willing to take before, and not after, the effects of neglect erupt into crises that we then treat with surprise? Tough questions, but ones we can not put off answering.

"Let the Blogs begin . . ."

2005-08-31T16:31:00.000-05:00

...was the cry I heard in my head when I woke up this morning. Yes, it is that time—the academic year commences, and with it, my blog. In my blog, I will report out with commentary on what is happening in the DC area and how it will or might impact our work on our campuses, in our classrooms, and in the field. Having said that, I must confess that I am new to blogging, and not completely sure what shape or form my blog will take other than I will start a conversation with you about some of the events and issues that I see, and your comments to the blog or to me individually will help shape how this conversation develops.

So, what’s on my mind this week?

I just read a piece from Inside Education by John Lombardi about another report decrying our students’ lack of reading. He was referring to the National Endowment for the Arts’ report, Reading at Risk. The report points out that students read much less literary work than they used to. This, of course, is a serious issue for us in the literary business. Lombardi’s point is that it may not be all that bad that our students are reading less, as they are consuming texts from other sources, or media, at a very high rate, and we ought to be looking at that.

I have often thought that condemning our students’ reading habits was missing the mark. Particularly as I listened to them discussing films and videos and observed my own children’s habits of participating in stories. What we are decrying when we lament our students’ lack of reading is the demise of a medium. Human beings have always needed and used stories—the narrative line that informs us, enlightens us, and leads us into and through complex thinking activities. For all but a very short period of our history, the medium was primarily oral and visual. The mass of society did not have the skills or opportunity to read books until about the middle of the 19th century, and then the book became the medium of choice for information exchange in most of its forms until the latter part of the 20th century—at best a short 100 year period in our history. Throughout most of our history, we have valued narrative as the primary means of perpetuating our culture and values. Even though I find a book, whether good or not, a comfort to hold, carry, and read (and re-read), my children do not. They line their shelves with videos. Which they re-watch probably more often than I re-read the volumes of print on my shelves. My son-in-law is an expert game player. In that medium, he participates in creating a story. Is that less interactive than my imagining a scene from Seamus Heany’s interpretation of Beowulf?

What we are participating in is as huge a shift in medium as the invention of the printing press. But the shift and its shift in literacies is coming much faster than it did with the printing press. What the NCTE Executive Committee discovered when they undertook a study of multi-modal literacies is that we will have to rethink how we define literacy. John Lovas, Kathi Yancey, and Doug Hesse demonstrated that at the last three CCCC Chair’s addresses at the CCCC convention. We are moving into a new age.

Do not misunderstand me. Print literacy is still the primary medium, particularly for academic work, and we must continue to support, promote, and above all, teach that literacy. However, let us not condemn our students because they have a more sophisticated understanding of media that you or I do not understand. Let us instead come to terms with the shift in media and help our students gain the critical analysis skills we learned with books to apply it to books and other forms as we struggle to re-define what it means to be literate.

Where is English Language Arts?

2005-08-31T16:26:00.000-05:00

Earlier this summer, the NCTE/DC office received notice that Senator Mike DeWine (R-OH) introduced three new pieces of legislation related to teacher preparation programs (S.1433, S.1434, and S.1435), an issue in which NCTE has a great deal of interest. Well, more than just interest, I would argue. Teacher preparation is a Council "raison d'etre". But what is missing from the Senator's legislation, as it all too often is from that of others, is any specific mention of "English language arts" as one of the content academic areas. Note that there is specific reference to mathematics, science, foreign language, history, and political science, to name a few, but not "English" teacher preparation as we know it. (I have always found it odd that this is often the case . Is it because politicians don't have a concept of "teaching English"? or is it because they think it is not vital to the well being of our nation? ["English" was always my worst subject", is a stereotypical, oft-repeated phrase.])

Whatever the reason for the choices underlying currently proposed legislation, NCTE's DC-area office will work to move forward legislation that provides funding and training to prepare teachers of English language arts to teach students to become effective writers, readers, listeners, speakers, and critical thinkers. We welcome your ideas on kinds of legislations needed.

Affirming What Works

2005-08-31T13:10:00.000-05:00

I’m glad to meet you through this blog and look forward to our sharing ideas over the months ahead. One advantage of blogging is that as we discuss forthrightly high priority or emerging issues that affect our teaching and learning, we don’t have to have organized all our thoughts on a topic or settled on solutions for problems. We can think aloud together as we consider matters that count.

One place I read about matters that count in the world is in the newspaper. A joy of living in Washington for me is starting the day by reading The Washington Post. A recent editorial and a recent column both focused on No Child Left Behind. The authors argue that we must look beyond “mere accountability toward the even more difficult, substantive question of how to improve schools.” This call for refocus implies that NCLB does not help improve schools through a focus on testing. NCTE, in fact, agreed with that contention by signing on last October to a statement by multiple organizations calling for fair testing. Indeed, in an Education Week article on August 31, 2005, about the ways in which civil rights groups split over NCLB, that statement is cited. NCTE is on record.

But, in his Post column David Broder contends that no matter the outcome of current legal battles about NCLB between states and the feds, a more productive approach to improvement is to pay attention to recommendations by a task force created by the Center for American Progress and other partners. These organizations found programs across the country that work and could be expanded to national scale -- if the political will and resources were present.

You’ll recognize some of the suggestions because NCTE supports them through its programs and initiatives:

Strengthen the high school curriculum

Improve student assessments beyond current tests

Upgrade teacher training and rewards

The issue is scalability. The Post editorial reports that last spring Rep. George Miller from California put forward a bill that builds on successful state programs. John Boehner, who heads the Committee, has said that he expects some of Miller’s suggestions to be incorporated into legislation this fall. The editorial concludes: “It’s a good start. When Congress comes back to town this fall—and the new school year begins—this debate should begin again in earnest.” Well, that time is now.

As the school year begins, teachers can consciously think about and share with others what works in their classrooms. Even with the negative pressures of NCLB, we all can follow the Post writers’ call to draw attention to programs that improve student learning. NCTE members are at the heart of such programs and need to be heard.

On Being Members of A Community

2005-08-31T09:38:00.000-05:00

Recently, I heard a radio interview with an author who charted the decline of community support for public education. He put together a persuasive case. Americans, the commentator invoked, are more devoted than ever to nurturing the potential of their own children. But the commitment to the children of others, as measured through failed bond referenda, decline in support for public after-school programs, and low approval ratings in polls about public schools, has weakened. The dreary conclusion is that we may be turning into a society of self-seeking clans.

But, when I think about the devoted NCTE members that I am privileged to know, I see the limits of the speaker’s dismal premise. We are a community of thousands of educators who care deeply about every student and child—not just our own. And like any true community, when we see suffering, we respond.

Last week, as the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina wrecked the traditional start of the school year, I received emails from members across the country. What can we do for the teachers, students, and families in the devastated area? Where can we send money, clothing, books, school supplies—anything to restore a semblance of the safety and security required for students to have a chance to learn and succeed?

These were earnest questions for which we had no immediate answers. As we get better information in the weeks ahead, we will be inviting members to help meet the greatest needs of literacy educators and their students in the afflicted areas. And members will respond. But before we do what we can to support the serious business of educating children in great need, we must remember to be hopeful—about the fate of all of our students, our schools, and our professional community.

While the circumstances are very different, the outpouring of energy and goodwill from NCTE members reminds me of the days following the September 11th tragedy. Concerned teachers crafted special lesson plans, sent school supplies, organized class projects—all in an effort to help students think clearly about how their worlds were changing, and take ownership through their writing and other expressive work. Our professional community always responds with concern for what matters most—students, their teachers, their families, and their schools. Perhaps some in our society do neglect community values. NCTE members do not.