October 2013 Archives

Ever wonder where the test creators get the material on which to ask questions for those high-stakes standardized tests? A typical question consists of three paragraphs of, usually, nonfiction prose that the test-taker reads for meaning and then responds to questions by filling in bubbles for electronic scoring. I can assure you that the companies who create tests don't write the writing samples. Instead, they scour children's nonfiction literature and ask authors like me for the rights to excerpt our books. How do I know? I have a two-inch-thick folder of permissions I've granted over the years.

Interestingly, my books are seldom the required classroom reading material. Content in disciplines like science and social studies is "gone over" from textbooks where the writing is flat at best and insulting to the reader at worst. On the tests, the kids are asked to figure out, for example, "what is the author's point of view?" How are they supposed to do that if they have only been exposed to politically correct material formulated by committee where there is no author pov?

Recently I received an email from a "passage writer" at the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation (CETE) in Lawrence, Kan., offering me $500 to write passages for the assessment tests. There were two attachments: "Tips for Writing Topics" and "Writing Guidelines." Here are a few excerpts:

"When coming up with topic ideas for reading passages, it's always best to go with something familiar to you. Choose topics in which you have prior knowledge or interest. This will make the passage easier to write, and will often reflect in the writing. Because writers may use a maximum of 5 sources when writing a passage, choosing passages in your realm of knowledge will also minimize the number of sources you have to rely on."

"Keep in mind that passages may not have references to drugs, sex, alcohol, gambling, magic, holidays, religion, violence, or evolution, and that topic ideas should not lend themselves to passages which would require such content."

"Use grade-appropriate vocabulary. To check your passage, use Microsoft Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level readability test (part of Microsoft Word programs)."

Clearly the authors of these documents didn't know who they were writing for. Did they think that after 90 books I need their tips? Do they have any idea how these "tips" flatten text and clip the wings of a talented writer? Is it their intention that the CCSS teach kids how to read bad writing? Don't they know that kids build vocabulary by being exposed to literature and spoken language where nuanced words are used in context, not through leveled readers with controlled vocabularies? And if you think kids can't learn multi-syllabic words, just talk to a 5-year-old expert on dinosaurs.

Another problem is that high-stakes testing produces an answer-driven culture in schools where getting the right answer becomes all-important. What happens when you give an answer? The inquiry stops.

Socrates gave us the key to powerful education more than 2,000 years ago. Questions, challenging questions, should drive learning. Creativity in science, history, journalism, and math comes from asking insightful questions. I love to tell kids the story of Isador Isaac Rabi (1898-1988) who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of magnetic resonance. He claimed he owed his success in science to his mother. Every day, when he came home from school she would ask him, "What good question did you ask today?" So I'm going to give you a few good questions for you to ask in assessing the learning of your children and the effectiveness of your schools:

Here's a question I've been asking my grandchildren and other school-age kids: Who among your teachers do you think is having fun teaching you? By "fun," I mean that you can tell that the teacher wants to be in the room with you, is engaged in the subject and cares that you are also engaged.

My grandson, Jonny, had to think a long time before he came up with his sixth grade Language Arts teacher. (He was in seventh grade at the time.) A tenth grader could only think of his young technology teacher. When I asked him why he accepted this status quo, he shrugged and said, "It is what it is." He goes to a highly rated high school in an upscale neighborhood.

A follow-up to this question is: How do you know that a teacher isn't having any fun teaching you? Jonny had an instant reply to this one: "Because I'm not learning very much."

Here's a question for teachers: What would it take for you to be the teacher you always dreamed of being? Their answers may be a better assessment than the "value-added" measures attached to student scores.

Not to ignore administrators: How can you expect teachers to teach critical thinking if they are not allowed to ask challenging questions about executing their jobs in a school system?

And while we're at it, here's one for the test creators: Since you're using our work as the basis for your tests, why don't you let us children's nonfiction authors take them?We should be able to ace them with flying colors, right? What would it mean if we flunked? I have absolutely no way of knowing how I'd do.

I'm just asking........

Lately, I've been travelling in the world of the educational policy makers--a strange and alien place to this children's nonfiction author.  Recently, within a week, I had breakfast with Dr. John King, Commissioner of Education for the State of New York, and dinner with Diane Ravitch, educational historian and activist on behalf of public education.  Don't get me wrong; these were not tête à têtes. Hundreds of others joined in the festivities. But I had a chance to listen and speak to each of them (two skills mandated by the CCSS). It is not possible to find two more well-intentioned, passionate advocates for effective education than these two. But they are not exactly in the same camp. Diane's group is opposed to the Common Core State Standards. New York State is obligated by law to implement them.

As a children's nonfiction author, I welcome the standards. They require that at least 50% of the reading in elementary schools and 75% of high school reading be nonfiction. There are only two rules that set nonfiction apart from fiction:

In nonfiction, nothing is made up. Period. No invented dialogue. Primary sources are cited. Procedures and instructions are explicit and replicable.

It is accurate and vetted (which might be a subset of rule 1).

But there is another distinction that is not obvious in the standards: the difference between high quality nonfiction literature and what many educators think of as nonfiction for kids - the flat, boring, uninspiring writing that is in textbooks. Many teachers are unaware of the riches nonfiction literature can bring to content. And since the CCSS says nothing about curriculum, implementing the standards means that educators are now free to insert wonderful books -of which there is a huge selection--into their science, social studies, history, math, art, music, and physical education classes. Teachers can continue to teach their favorite fictional literature but now the door is open to using nonfiction literature across the curriculum. So, to the teacher who told me that she didn't like the arbitrary quota of 50%, I say that when you add high-quality reading across all disciplines, even if you keep all the fiction you like in ELA, this quota is more than met. The CCSS definitely don't mean that you should substitute deadly prose about the real world for those magical moments in ELA classes when great stories come to life. In anticipation of the CCSS, I have formed an organization of about 30 of the top children's nonfiction authors so that teachers can discover their wonderful books in our FREE database on our website and bring the joy of learning back into the classroom.

I learned from John King that the CCSS came out of a governors' meeting several years ago.  Governors want to attract businesses to their states.  Before relocating, businesses want to know about the quality of each state's labor pool.  The question for each governor was: What can your state's workers be trained to do? This generated a conversation about the skill sets needed by businesses and how well each state was doing in producing capable workers. The standards and measures for the different states was all over the waterfront.  Rather than compete with each other, the governors agreed to work together to establish common standards for college and career readiness. And so the Common Core State Standards came to be. John King said: "The organization of CEOs for Cities did a study that showed if you added a single percentage rate for college achievement in NY you would add 17.5 billion dollars of economic activity." Hmmm...there's nothing wrong with that.  

If you read the Common Core State Standards, you will see that they are quite benign.  There is nothing in there about curriculum, what books are to be read, just a shift to reading a lot more complex text about the real world.  I see it as an opening for us authors and a defeat for the textbook manufacturers (although they seem to be buying rights to books like mine.) That's why I was startled at the dinner when I heard the vitriolic hatred of the CCSS. And when I asked the speaker, a veteran teacher of 35 years, if he had read them, he allowed that he had not.  The fly in the ointment is the testing. More particularly the high-stakes placed on the tests and the absurd notion that a teacher's value added comes from the way his/her students perform on the assessment tests. There is nothing wrong with testing. We've always tested. When I was a teacher almost 50 years ago my students took tests. There were three possible outcomes.

The student test performance was about the same as their performance in my class.  

The student performed poorly on the test but well in my class.

The student performed well on the test but poorly in my class.

As a teacher, the only result I paid attention to was number 3. If the student aced the test but was doing sub-standard work in my class, I knew there was something wrong and I worked to correct it.

When I taught back in those days, I had autonomy to teach creatively. I didn't use the textbook but found other more interesting science reading material for my students on curriculum content. I worked to make sure that they understood the basics and gave them all kinds of fun details to make the basics memorable. We spent a less than a week practicing test questions just before they took the tests. They did just fine.  

I agree with Diane Ravitch's criticism of the testing. Test prep, in my opinion, is a form of child abuse. Schools lose almost two months of instruction between the time spent on test prep and the tests themselves. The new tests, based on the CCSS, are predicted to produce dismal failure across the board. So what!  Let's use the CCSS to teach the best way we know how. Give the tests with minimal test prep, use the data internally along with other measures of school effectiveness, and let the chips fall where they may. And, at least for the next few years, sever the connection between test results and real estate values.  In 1986, I wrote an article for Parents Magazine called "A,B,C, or F: Test Your Child's School." In it, I said: "Taking these tests too seriously can be a big red flag. If a school gears teaching to these tests by drilling students on the bits of knowledge needed to fill in the blanks, bored, turned-off kids are a certain outcome. Ask what the school's policy is on standardized testing. Do teachers end up teaching to the test? Know that the best schools take testing in stride and have faith that good educational practices produce fine results on tests."

As a scientist, when I didn't get the results from an experiment that I expected or wanted, I figured that the problem lay in my experimental design, not in the natural phenomenon I was exploring. (Nature doesn't lie!) The test makers need to find other ways of measuring student achievement rather than a single yearly snapshot where teachers are given instructions on how to handle tests that have vomit on them so that the results can be tabulated. And the educational community and the public need to stop giving the test outcomes so much power.