It’s rained today and yesterday, and the Hard Luck Creek fire has been knocked down. The choking smoke is gone, displaced by a refreshing gray drizzle. What a relief! The fire was mapped at over 13,000 acres, only about 6 miles from where I live (just off the lower right-hand corner of the fire map). It was described as “creeping and smoldering” throughout the week, with a high potential for growth if the weather stayed dry. But since the trees and bushes and are now dripping wet, growth potential for the fire has been downgraded to ‘low.’
Back at work in meetings all week, with the fire activity so close to home, I couldn’t help but make connections between NCLB and natural disasters. Like the “creeping and smoldering” trend in federal education policy, the fire was at the very least a distraction from other important things I had to think about as we began preparing for the new school year. Instead of talking about learning and curriculum, these days, we’re discussing testing and intervention. We’re locked into a defensive posture anticipating possible accountability measures that might be imposed on us. And rather than wait for the hammer to drop from the State, the school district administration is making a big push to create it’s own defensible space by setting up a Response to Intervention framework for elementary programs, going back to the middle school concept at the junior high level, and establishing small learning teams for the high schools. None of these are bad ideas. In fact, they all have the potential to be very good. But after listening to a presentation on RTI, delivered by a guy from Tennessee, many of us had a strong sense of being sold a bill of goods.
This is where top-down management always goes wrong. A destination is identified, and a course is defined. Everyone is mobilized and told they need to get with the program and stick together. But when we get down to business, those of us closest to the classroom see that the plan on paper won’t take us where we need to go, and there may be a better way to get there. Compliance and control then become at least part of our discussion, along with much data-driven anguish and conflict. To their credit, our administration has been responsive to teacher input, and I hope they continue to listen because some of the stuff being proposed now is just wrong.
We were told that we’d be getting rid of DIBELS testing, and I was optimistic that rationality was returning to our school until I learned that the district will be using AimsWeb, a slick DIBELS techno-clone that generates all manner of data based on reading rates and other measurable abominations. We were told that we’ll need to find some half-hour blocks where we can do “interventions” with groups of students who are not making adequate progress on the one-minute reading “fluency” tests, and that fidelity to any adopted programs will be critical to student success. This did not play well with veteran teaching staff who question the aims and practicality of this approach to reform. While I am in favor of formative assessment, I do not believe we should confuse reading rate with reading fluency, and I hope we do not make reading rates a district-wide instructional objective at the elementary level.
I ordered Richard Allington’s book about RTI, No Quick Fix when I got home from work after this meeting. I also found an audio file in which he talks about possibilities for RTI beyond those that were proposed for us. It is good, I think, to work on getting better at what we do. But that effort falls apart when it’s presented as a simple matter of following the “one best way” to get the job done. I know that there are a lot of people elsewhere who have experience with RTI, but this is our first taste, and I’d like to know what it might look like from more than one angle.
These sorts of initiatives serve a constructive purpose when they get us talking to one another and trying new things. But when our practical knowledge is discounted, incoherence is sure to follow. We need to build capacity for teachers to exercise professional judgment, and not simply train them to follow a manual.
6 Comments
First, I’m glad to hear the weather finally cooperated and you can all get back closer to normal.
Defensive postures, oh, my, yes. Anyone who has taught long enough to gain any confidence at all in what they do and how they do it gets nervous when “the outside” proposes changes. We examine proposals suspiciously, looking for potentially negative impacts on how we do what we love to do, and rightly so. We’re good at what we do, and changing how we do it might well negatively impact our performance.
People (ourselves included) lose track of the fact that students, teachers, communities are not homogenous groups – they see a method that works in a carefully controlled instance and generalize its efficacy to the entire spectrum. Then they blame the fact that it didn’t work on improper implementation.
I spent decades “teaching lit” (mostly American and English)to kids who would far rather talk than read or write (I know. Hardly a unique experience). It didn’t take me long to figure out that the only way to do that, for me, was to hold far-ranging class discussions about what they’d read, how they could write about it, what they had written about it, how it all tied in. Or the weather.
It didn’t always look good from the outside, but my kids did well, even after the “objective assessments” started rolling down from the top. When the “do it this way” started sliding in, though, I had a devil of a time changing who I was and who my kids were.
“Defensive” is probably “understatement.”
Glad to hear your fire has turned around. Living here, I’ve had some experiences with them as well. We’ve been evacuated over the years several times when fires creep too close to our one highway in and out of town.
As for the “quick fix;” it simply does not exist in education (or probably in any other industry for that matter)
Welcome to the world of RTI! We started about a year and a half ago and the process and how you keep the data has only changed about 4 or 5 times. Some data collection we do on Aimsweb and another data collection service (which has changed twice) we use only happens once every 3 months and the trainers can’t figure out why people don’t remember all the steps or all they can do … besides the fact that it already changed a little in that time.
Then watch out when school board members and department heads and the like figure out that we can print out this data. Not only will you get to input data (so you can print it out) of even more dubious worth than some of the other data, you get to have meetings where the upshot is usually when we inform whoever it is that much of this data can’t be compared, or can’t be compared from one grade to another (well it can I guess but doing that is worthless)or doesn’t really tell us much that would help drive instruction.
So you were right on in your post when you talk about wondering what might be coming that you’ll have to adjust to instead of doing what you know and think will work well, or using the data that is helpful (and there is some) to make meaningful adjustments. We have the added bonus of not making AYP for the 2nd year (in 3 categories out of 48) so we already have a training next week that will continue every month for the year!!! So if they let you use RTI fairly unfettered, you’ll probably find it mostly valuable … but … : )
Have a great year!
Brian
Brian, your experience sounds all too much like what I expected. Thanks for the warning.
“…those of us closest to the classroom see that the plan on paper won’t take us where we need to go, and there may be a better way to get there. Compliance and control then become at least part of our discussion…”
This is the single greatest change in schools, in my experience over three decades. It’s not that (most) teachers are resisting change, or unconcerned about their students’ learning progress. It’s the fact that their experience with these particular students and the act of teaching does not square with all of the goals and processes of the new program. And when they point that out, the problem/solution is misidentified as non-compliance, rather than dissonance in professional judgment.
The next step in this thinking looks like this: where can I get a revolving-door cadre of teachers with little experience but lots of confidence that they can change the world? Teachers like *that* would be compliant…
RTI, ULSS, and the rest are simply money-making ventures for the purveyors. Teachers know who needs intervention; hell, we are muted when we try to advocate for intervention because it costs money!
I guess we, American Public Education advocates, must wait for this trend to peak, then it will go away, only to be brought back in twenty years.
Just teach your kids and stay out of trouble.
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