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About Me
- Robert Hankes
- PSPA President; PSPA Literary Magazines Evaluation Chair for many years; teaches at Big Spring HS in Newville, PA; co-advises the literary magazine Charisma with PSPA Vice-President Mike McVitty; married with three kids (23, 9, and 6).
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Changing Course
Most schools, as with most organizations, can become stagnant because they become content with the status quo. Change is difficult, especially for a well-entrenched organization. No one likes change. It’s uncomfortable. In fact, there is a biological term that helps explain this problem. It’s called disequilibrium. Organisms seek equilibrium – a balance where they can merely exist by maintaining the way things are. If something occurs in that organism’s environment, the organism is often forced to adapt to the new situation. When this happens, we have what is called disequilbrium. Things are out of balance, out of whack, and the organism must now do something different in order to survive. If a temperature change occurs in the ocean, the fish must swim deeper to cooler waters. If a drought causes a change in the food supply, animals must migrate to find new water supplies and move to new hunting grounds. The animals need to adapt to the new demands in order to survive or they will die. This is a reality in nature. If an organism or species refuses to adapt, it will die out.
This same process also applies to organizations. When a crisis confronts an organization, it needs to make changes in order to overcome the problem. If not, that organization will flounder, become ineffectual, and may eventually become go bankrupt. A good example might be General Motors. The world is faced with limited oil resources, and the cost of oil kept going up and up. People started turning to fuel efficient cars, but General Motors kept building full-size pick-up trucks and SUV’s. Now General Motors is faced with an overstock of vehicles it can’t sell; because it can’t sell off its inventory of gas-guzzlers, then their profits are way down. Now they don’t have the funds to re-tool and invest in new hybrid technologies. Because they didn’t change and adapt to the demands placed on them by the economic environment, they are in trouble. However, they’re not the only organization that’s in trouble. Schools are in hot water also, but for different reasons.
What’s the problem?
Since in the implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2001, schools have been given the task to get every student up to a minimal level of competency. In other words, students should be reading, writing, and doing math at their designated grade level. Whether or not one thinks getting every student up to speed is a realistic goal or not isn’t the question. This is the goal set up by the federal government, and generally speaking, it is a worthy goal. Public schools should be producing students who can read and write and add and subtract.
In order to insure that the students are reaching these goals, each state has set up a series of tests to measure individual student performance as well as to assess how well schools are doing in general. Big Spring High School students are tested with the Pennsylvania State System of Assessments (PSSA) in the areas of reading, writing, mathematics, and now science. Students’ test results fall into one of four categories: below basic, basic, proficient, or advanced. The goal is to have every student at the proficient or advanced level by the year 2014.
When looking at the scores from Big Spring High School, the public sees two things. Scores from the 8th grade test to the 11th grade test drop. This is a pattern that is seen across the state in most every school district. The scores tend to increase from the elementary grades to the middle grades, but then take a nose-dive once the PSSA is given in 11th grade.
A second pattern is found when looking at the performance of Big Spring students over multiple years. Their performance is flat. In other words, about the same percentage of students pass the PSSA every year. Students are showing no growth. This again is a common problem across the state. Many districts are stagnant as far as their test scores go. The problem is that as part of No Child Left Behind, schools MUST demonstrate improvement every year. This is called Annual Yearly Progress. The high jump bar is raised a little bit every year, so that by the year 2014, all students should be scoring proficient or advanced. That’s the target. It doesn’t matter whether or not teachers or parents or students think this target is attainable; this one mandate is the motivating factor that is forcing schools to take a serious look at what is causing students to fall behind – and students are falling behind.
Thirty-eight percent of all 4th graders in the United States read at the below basic level. By 8th grade, 43 percent of poor students are reading at the below basic level. In math, 61% of black students and 53% of Latino students perform at the below basic level (Haycock, 2006).
Currently, only 68% of students go on to graduate from high school; the rate among minority students is even less at just over half. This latter statistic is especially troubling seeing that those without a high school diploma end up earning an average of $19,000 per year which puts them in poverty (Kahlenerg, 2004; Swanson, 2004). Since a college education is one of the most reliable tickets up and out of poverty, one should note that only 7 percent of low income students will earn a college degree, and about half of all students who enter college will never return for a second year (Olson, 2005, p. 18).
The cause for this failure is not socioeconomic in nature. As reported by Schmoker (2006), a number of the highest performing schools in North Carolina, Ohio, and Illinois are among the poorest in their respective states. “High poverty, high-minority schools in New York City outperform their counterparts in Los Angeles and Washington D.C., by two full years” (21). In one successful district in Texas, black students perform better on national tests of writing than white, non-poor students in seven other states. Additionally, in one district in Virginia, Latino students score higher on the NAEP 4th grade reading test than white, non-poor students in 17 states (Haycock, 2005).
So what are these higher performing schools doing?
The first factor has to do with what the school is focusing on. In the past, schools have been asked to address every new social issue that comes along. When a problem arises in society, schools generate a whole new curriculum to tackle it, so now classes exist that deal with teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, personal finance, teen smoking and a litany of other issues. It’s not that these aren’t worthy topics to consider. The problem is that we end up with a curriculum that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. When one looks at the standards for the state of Pennsylvania, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Schools and teachers need to learn to major on the majors and minor on the minors. Initially, the majors can be defined as power standards, those key standards that the state deems so essential that they’re testing them to make sure students have some level of mastery. In short, teachers need to align their classroom curriculum with these standards.
Second, teachers need to teach the essential material to students so that students master it. Schmoker points out that good instruction is by far the single greatest determinant of learning, not the socioeconomics of the students or the community. “Mortimore and Sammons (1987) found that teaching had 6 to 10 times as much impact on achievement as all other factors combined” (Schmoker 9). After a number of studies, Odden and Wallace (2003) concluded that “improved classroom instruction is the prime factor to produce student achievement gains” (64).
So what constitutes good instruction? Fortunately, it’s not a big secret. Unfortunately, not enough teachers make full use of time-tested, research-backed teaching techniques.
Clearly defined learning objective
Careful modeling of what is to be learned
Clear sequence of steps
Continual monitoring for understanding
Most teachers will say that they’ve been doing this ever since they finished their introductory methods classes in college. However, studies have shown that teachers actually spend a great deal of time on activities that have very little to do with essential content and very little to do with good instruction. After visiting hundreds of classrooms in a number of states, Schmoker concluded that “the majority of lessons lacked the most fundamental elements of good instruction.” It wasn’t even clear what the learning outcome was to him or to the students (86). Doug Reeves, an expert in the area of supervision and educational leadership, was “dismayed by the amount of time students spent ‘coloring, cutting, and pasting’” (Schmoker 86). In short, too much time is spent doing busy work with no connection to the standards that are outlined by a common curriculum or by the state.
In order for teachers to boil down their curriculum to what is essential and then to develop common lessons and assessments, they need time to collaborate. The main problem with collaboration is that teachers have a tendency to go into their rooms and shut their doors and merely give lip-service to collaboration. Teachers need to develop a common curriculum based upon key, targeted standards; coordinate lesson and unit plans; share teaching ideas; and create common assessments that monitor students’ progress. In order to accomplish this, they need regularly scheduled time.
Finally, more emphasis needs to be put on literacy education. Literacy education involves three main activities: reading about, writing about, and discussing relevant issues. However, the research on how prepared our students are in this area is alarming. A Nation at Risk, the ground breaking report published in 1983 that looked closely at how well our schools are doing, found that 13% of all 17 year-olds are functionally illiterate. The percentage is even higher among minority youth where about 40% are functionally illiterate. Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading found that “the amount of independent, silent reading children do in school is significantly related to gains in reading achievement. However, the amount of time children spend reading in the average classroom is small. An estimate of silent reading time in the typical primary school class is 7 or 8 minutes per day, or less than 10% of the toal time devoted to reading” (76). Paul (1996) points out that the amount of time students spend reading for pleasure or for school peaks between the 4th and 6th grades and then starts to make a steady decline all the way through middle school and high school. But if we want to improve our students’ reading abilities, then we need to get them to read (Reutzel & Hollingsworth, 1991; Taylor, Frye, & Maruyoma, 1990). There’s no secret to it. Readers improve by reading, and the “ability to read well is the single best indicator of future economic success regardless of family background” (BBC News, 2002).
In conclusion, we can improve our students’ success on the PSSA by limiting what is taught to the essentials, using classroom time to its fullest, and focusing on literacy instruction. The key to improvement won’t be found in knee jerk initiatives, in-services, and workshops. In fact, many of the sought after awards such as being classified a Blue Ribbon School, have nothing to do with bringing up test scores or improving student learning.
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