That’s what I thought as I read through a new framework for teaching K-12 history in the U.S.—California’s History-Social Science Framework.

This is supposed to be the new, 21st-century approach. It spans hundreds of pages of minute detail. But the document privileges comprehensiveness over vision. This history framework doesn’t seem to recognize the value of history.

Consider the framework for fifth grade. It’s 164 pages. The book-length document defines the theme for the year (“making a new nation”) and provides a jumble of guiding questions (e.g., how proximity to water affected the lives of North American Indians, why colonists rebelled against Great Britain), a narrative of the history that should be covered, teaching resources, and even classroom activities (e.g., team analysis of paintings depicting the American Revolutionary War).

Absent, though, is any concise statement of why all this content, and the skills needed to thoroughly analyze that content, are important. In other words, why should anyone care?

There are good answers to that question. I have a doctorate in history and used to teach college courses in American and world history; now I’m a social studies curriculum designer at an education technology company. I know that history can be more than simply enriching or engrossing. It teaches students about the messiness of the world in which they live; it invites them to argue and speak truth to power. It shows them that they, too, are historical actors. In a word, it is empowering.

But it’s hard to sense that when reading through the various state frameworks for social studies. Unlike math and language arts, social studies has no set of standards approved by multiple states, so my colleagues and I are left to sift through idiosyncratic and sometimes-conflicting documents. And California’s is far from the worst: It doesn’t have the whiff of politicization in Texas’ elementary school standards, which ask teachers to communicate the “benefits of the free enterprise system,” or the local bias of Tennessee’s—which asks second graders to identify 11 “major” American cities, four of which are in Tennessee itself.

The California’s instructional framework doesn’t insist upon one particular approach, either, trusting teachers to find different ways to communicate ideas. It’s also current—it draws on new research about teaching effectiveness, inclusion of underserved groups of students, and fostering 21st-century skills. In many ways, it’s a model for other states across the U.S.

But nowhere does it say why history matters.

I can guess why the standards don’t answer this question. In most schools across the country, it’s math and language arts, and the testing tied to them, that drive instruction. So it’s hard to justify social studies education on its own terms. Rather, educators are forced to present this subject as serving the other subjects. Students use their graph-reading skills in history class to reinforce math lessons. Reading primary sources lets students exercise critical thinking skills learned in language arts classes—which prepares students for the next language arts test.

The problem is that learning history isn’t merely useful for learning other things. When we reduce it to that, we lose an opportunity to think about history as illuminating and transformative on its own.

I had a favorite assignment when I taught college survey courses on global and American history. At the end of the semester, I asked students to become teachers. Each student was to draft a short lecture that identified and explained themes in the hundreds of years and thousands of miles we had covered over the course of the semester. The lecture assignment was an opportunity for students to think not just about facts and figures—the Chinese dynastic periods, the transatlantic slave trade, the texts of the Enlightenment—but to make connections between them. Were there links between seemingly disparate places and across seemingly unrelated cultures? Common themes or chartable changes over time? I wanted students to put together what they’d learned in a meaningful way.

Students had different reactions to the lecture assignment. The conscientious ones were often annoyed. For them, the assignment seemed like a betrayal of the unspoken rules for most survey classes; it required more than simply doing the reading and memorizing names and dates. On the other hand, students who naturally thought beyond the limits of the textbook were energized. These were the ones who forgot to do the reading on the Cold War and Soviet politics because they were so excited to get a head start on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. These were the students who could identify the big ideas of social discord and globalization across the various facts that we had learned, the students who wanted to debate with me even though I was the authority figure. These students might not earn A’s, but they were using history to make sense of the world around them.

These are the students state officials should be thinking about when they design history standards.

To make the necessary changes, we could start with those few state standards that try to say something about the value of history. Part of the rationale for an eighth grade standard in Wisconsin reads: “Reconstructing and interpreting historical events provides a needed perspective in addressing the past, the present, and the future.” The statement is vague but sound. This is what history does: It provides perspective.

But even states like Wisconsin can go further. Any guide to teaching history should open with a few clear paragraphs laying out the vision. Forget about the usefulness of history for a moment and concentrate on what history education can do for students. It teaches them how to make sense of the world around them—so that they might make history of their own.

The post Schools Aren’t Teaching Kids to Argue Truth to Power appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I have spent the past 20 years teaching immigrant high schoolers, many of those years in California, where 23 percent of K-12 students are English learners. Though there are some young immigrants, like my mother, who arrive in this country with a strong academic foundation, the vast majority of them do not. They come mostly from rural communities in Mexico and Central America and their schooling is rudimentary at best; few have read one book, never mind many.

When we talk about educating immigrant students, we focus almost entirely on teaching them English, but for many students the needs run deeper. In 2012, I taught at the Fremont High School Newcomers Program in the Fruitvale neighborhood of East Oakland. My students there were Mayans from Guatemala, who had had so little formal schooling we needed to teach some of them the alphabet. But they were not empty-handed. They also brought with them hope, resilience, and an ability to rely on their community that was rare in their adopted neighborhoods.

The idea for newcomer high schools and programs within regular high schools took off in the 1970s because this focused instruction proved so effective at helping students integrate linguistically and culturally. Since 2000, though, their numbers have fallen by at least half because of post-recession budget cuts and difficulty conforming to the testing requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Fremont High School had a 15-foot-high, barbed-wire fence, a security guard, and seven full-time security officers patrolling the grounds. The fence and guards were not there to keep people out, but rather to keep the students in. The buildings were dilapidated and covered with graffiti. The windows were barred, as were the doors, the lockers banged up and dented. There was rarely toilet paper in the bathrooms, and if there was, it was strewn all over the floor. After lunch, the halls and patios were covered with paper plates and half-eaten pizzas, apple cores, and purposefully squished oranges; the air was filled with cursing and the ubiquitous odor of marijuana. When it was windy, napkins flew about, keeping low like the ghosts of birds who had died a violent death.

The Newcomers Program, in contrast, is a sheltered environment, where immigrant teens study the basic subjects in English and take intensive English classes. Here students form a community, sharing curse words and traditional dances, as well as their problems. When one student was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized just a few weeks after he arrived in Oakland, the students supported him. I was struck by his maturity and lack of anger: “They thought that if they hurt me, they would be strong, but they are not strong,” he said.

My students had strong emotional survival skills, but they didn’t know that there were planets or that the Earth revolved around the sun. They did not know that the world was divided into continents or that it was round. They did not think it was flat, either. They had simply never thought about what the Earth was beyond where they were from. They did not know the difference between a city and a state and a country. They knew they were in California, but they didn’t quite understand the difference between California and Oakland and the United States.

So in the Newcomers Program, we all started from the beginning. I began my class with the Big Bang and continued on to the creation of the solar system and Earth, to Pangaea and tectonic plates and the seven continents and dinosaurs and the evolution of Homo sapiens. That took months. There were so many gaps in their knowledge that I kept finding I had to go back farther. Once when I said, “Save a tree. Don’t waste paper,” they asked me, “What do trees have to do with paper?” So I went all the way back to the beginning to show them how paper was made and to teach them about deforestation in the Amazon. They had never heard of the Amazon, so I had to backtrack again.

I felt as though I was always backtracking, though I understood that what we were really doing was moving slowly forward, building not only on what I taught them but also on the strength of what they had brought with them. Like my mother, they had survived violence and carried unique advantages. They know that they are strong—like the young man who was beaten so badly—for they have traveled through Mexico on the top of the train called La Bestia; they have been robbed by coyotes and crossed the desert on foot; they have brought with them their looms to weave huipiles so that they will never forget the past even as they are making their future.

My students made tremendous progress, but this progress looked like failure on the standardized tests: Their academic abilities were still far below grade-level and all tests are in English, which they have not yet mastered. By the time they are seniors, they most certainly will not be able to read Silas Marner. My most gifted Mam-speaking student is now in 11th grade, and is taking Algebra II in a regular high school class. The young man who was beaten up in his early days in Oakland is also on track to graduate, but many students have dropped out to have babies and work. Yet, this is not necessarily a failure. They have learned to speak English and how to read and write. They know that the universe began with a Big Bang and that paper comes from trees.

Over the past 20 years there has been a constant debate about how to educate immigrants, and most of this debate has focused on the acquisition of English: what proficiency in English is, how long it should take a student to reach it, and whether total immersion, bilingual education, or sheltered classes taught in English works best. Recently there has been an emphasis on cultural awareness and how to integrate this into the curriculum. All of these things are certainly part of the equation, but I have learned that there is no algorithm, no one ideal way to address all the needs of all English learners.

Because newcomers bring with them a great variety of skills and come from such diverse academic and cultural backgrounds, programs must be flexible. We cannot serve these students if we let ourselves be controlled by state and federal edicts or by the data accumulated by standardized tests and scientific studies. We must meet students where they are, keeping in mind what they have brought with them. There should be more vocational programs for students who are not on a college track and partnerships so that students can take hands-on courses in such fields as health technology, mechanics, and carpentry. When schools provide newcomers with the extra support they need and a safe, nurturing, and rigorous academic community, they will make progress. This progress will not necessarily be evident in the data, but it will be evident to them. This progress will be the foundation for a new generation of Americans.

The post My Immigrant Kids Don’t Test Well—But They’re Learning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was the reality for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) elementary school teachers in August 2010, when the Los Angeles Times published a database with thousands of teachers’ names alongside a measure of how much “value” each had added to their students’ standardized test scores.

The fallout from the Times database, which relied solely on students’ math and English scores on the California Standards Tests, has been national in scope. The National Education Policy Center re-analyzed the data, using a different statistical model, and found that 54 percent of teachers in the Times’ database fell into a different effectiveness category. Calling the Times’ release “reckless,” the Center’s analysis joined a maelstrom of critiques and legal battles that continue today.

A notable calm in this storm is the near universal acceptance that teaching quality should be evaluated using multiple measures. These include observing teaching practice over time, asking students to report on the quality of their experience, and analyzing the rigor of assignments. The work of teaching is complex, as is the resulting arc of student learning. In order to capture what’s really happening in classrooms, we need a variety of tools to mitigate the error associated with any one measure. But, as schools and districts are discovering, the devil is in the details. Creating a system for collecting, analyzing, and using multiple data points to promote teacher learning and growth requires infrastructure, reliable measures, hours of administrative and teacher time, technical expertise, and, above all, faith and trust in the process.

Ensuring that faith and trust is no easy feat. Many teachers in Los Angeles are wary of the centralized systems under construction to monitor their performance and enhance their growth. The Times’ misstep was followed by massive LAUSD layoffs due to budget cuts, and, in 2012, by the acrimonious Vergara v. California lawsuit, which continues to focus public attention on how to fire bad teachers. In this context, it takes strength and courage to open up your classroom door and invite others in to evaluate the quality of your practice.

That’s just what a group of teachers at one Los Angeles public school is doing. For the past five years, teachers at the UCLA Community School, in the central city neighborhood of Koreatown, have been mapping out their own process of evaluation based on multiple measures—and building both a new system and their faith in it.

As one of Los Angeles’ 50 “pilot schools”—district schools with charter-like autonomy to innovate—this school is the only one trying to create its own teacher evaluation infrastructure, building on the district’s groundwork. As the school’s research director, I’ve helped support data collection and analysis, but the evaluation process is owned by the teachers themselves.

Indeed, these teachers embrace their individual and collective responsibility to advance exemplary teaching practices and believe that collecting and using multiple measures of teaching practice will increase their professional knowledge and growth. They are tough critics of the measures under development, with a focus on making sure the measures help make teachers better at their craft.

When it came to student surveys, for instance, teachers added questions that were open-ended, pressing students to explain how the teachers could improve. Students made a variety of helpful suggestions, such as asking for more explanation of math strategies. Teachers also received scores in areas such as academic challenge and classroom engagement, which were further broken down by student groups. For example, a simple bar graph allowed teachers to see whether struggling students felt as supported or challenged as their high-achieving peers. I met with a few teachers and was impressed to hear them reflect on how they could better reach failing students. One teacher was moved to tears looking at her scores, remarking, “These are my students talking to me.” Throughout this feedback process, I was struck by how much teachers appreciated external, trustworthy data on their daily practice.

In addition to student surveys, the school’s principal and assistant principal spent hours observing the teachers’ classrooms, documenting their instructional moves and practices and later debriefing what went well and what could be improved. Teachers also assembled a portfolio containing an assignment they gave students, how they taught this assignment, and samples of the student work produced. This portfolio was scored by educators trained at UCLA to assess teaching quality on several dimensions, including academic rigor and relevance. Teachers then completed a reflection on the scores they received, what they learned from the data, and how they planned to improve their practice.

After receiving these three different kinds of data—student surveys, observations, and portfolio assessments—almost all teachers reported in a survey that they appreciated receiving multiple measures of their practice. Most teachers reported that the measures were a fair assessment of the quality of their teaching, and that the evaluation process helped them grow as educators. But there was also consensus that more information was needed to help them improve their scores. For example, some teachers wanted to know how to make assignments more relevant to students’ lives; others asked for more support reflecting on their observation transcripts.

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of this new system was that it restored teachers’ trust in the process of evaluation. Very few teachers trust that value-added measures—which are based on tests that are far removed from their daily work—can inform their improvement. This is an issue explored by researchers who are probing the unintended consequences of teacher accountability systems tied to value-added measures (such as the formula used by the L.A. Times). For example, Harvard researcher Susan Moore Johnson cautions that value-added evaluation methods may reduce trust and undermine collaboration, affirming schools as egg-crate organizations where teachers work in isolation. We know that schools flourish when the adults inside are working together, not apart. Long-term research on school reform affirms the central role that relational trust and respect play in improving schools.

The L.A. Times database and other rankings miss the most important qualities of great teachers. They open their classroom doors and make their practice public. And they trust their colleagues and others to tell them when they are calling on some students over others, to point out when their lesson doesn’t challenge all students, or to suggest ways to enliven classroom discussions. Embracing and acting upon this sort of feedback takes courage and isn’t easy, especially in today’s education climate. But focusing public attention on teacher learning and betterment is the best route to restoring trust in teacher evaluation. That’s a story worth sharing with your neighbors.

The post How Do You Measure a Teacher’s Worth? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.