The Chair of the Quality Education Commission and a former public education advocate say Oregon's school funding is inadequate to meet its goals while performance metrics misdiagnose its problems
The phrase “ Our policymakers have come to value that which is measurable, rather than measure what is valuable,” so well sums up a significant part of the problem. Thank you for this thoughtful article. It should be required reading for all of our state lawmakers.
One comment about those coming to Bend from other states. This, as John and Laurie have said, is a national problem. Just as legislation at the national level is only as effective as it implemented at that state and local level, our representatives at all levels need to be included in this discussion. There are national professional organizations that have yet to address the political efforts to undermine the best efforts of educators, researching studying cognitive development, and educational theorists like Kieran Egan, respected by the international educational community but seldom mentioned south of the Canadian border, but whose work on 5 stages of cognitive development have yet to gain traction in the USA, whose death last month was hardly noticed:
In his obituary, a colleague in Mexico shared a list of his advice to her which speaks to the work that you are doing:
Believe in your students, in the value of their ideas, in their willingness to learn, give them opportunities to also believe in themselves.
Support your students' projects and initiatives, give them quality feedback, listen carefully.
Question your own beliefs, your ideas, your predispositions about the world.
Learning is the most beautiful capacity we have.
There is no authentic wisdom without humility.
Be coherent. What you teach about education, live it, too. The best teaching is given by example.
Dedicating ourselves to education is a mission that carries great responsibility. Improving it is possible.
An education where imagination is the heart of learning is possible.
Our mentors are many; their followers are few. Your efforts are a continuation of their struggle to change the world through education. Crisis is where opportunity and danger are one. Let us recognize this moment for what it is.
Thank you for letting me be part of your discussion.
Let me add a bit more in terms of strategies that I believe would work to gain support. As a retired senior in Bend, Oregon, which has become a Zoom town, I bring my totally engaging Australian Labradoodle to my local off-leash dog-park, leaving her to zoom with other dogs while I engage parents, grandparents, visitors from other states, and IT developers. Almost all of them understand the limitations of online instruction. Parents found nothing compelling about instruction they found trivial and boring. Encouraging their children to focus on the lesson seemed hardly worth the effort. IT developers understand the opportunity created by COVID as well as the limitations of those creating programs, hoping to find buyers who know as little about technology as they do about education. Constantly, I hear complaints about the failure of teachers to focus on spelling and to have abandoned cursive, which helps students gain a better recognition of words as they experience how letters connect to create certain sounds. If oral language captured the sounds and images of the world embodied in sounds that replicate experience, knowing how to spell the names of political leaders, nations, capitals, composers, plants, and animals allows students to own them rather than be diminished by a world over which they have no handle for control. When I suggest that having instruction that is actually respected by adults might encourage them to learn how to support learners at home and in their classrooms, they let me know that this makes sense but have no idea what incentive would be needed to get them up to speed. If we were training interns in college to work in our schools and inviting members of the community and interested high school students to join them, we could develop a cadre of tutors and aides capable of working to individualize instruction and support group instruction for those who need it. While COVID developed a market for online learning, it also revealed the shortcomings of instruction that separated students from being physically connected to their subjects. Cooking and shop provide concrete experience for measurements, ratios, and angles. Singing brings tone, emotion, and rhythm to words, along with the intention that comes with having an audience receive what's being communicated. Project based learning that is truly based on exploring a subject in depth creates a sense of depth and accomplishment that getting the right answers on a summative assessment does not.
In short, you have broad support for questioning the value of virtual schools and online education. School boards hunkered down in their bunkers now see parents as a potential threat and are loath to give them the opportunity to voice their concerns. But, for you, they can be your greatest asset. I fear that teachers are too overwhelmed right now to realize the benefit of supporting the effort you are leading to fight on their behalf. Unlike those who have retired from full-time teachers but remain educators for life, they have families to support, mortgages to pay off, grades to turn in, and a learning curve to master the iPad programs their students are using to receive lessons they need to absorb in order to try to present them as effectively as they can. That is as much agency as they are being offered at this time, other than modeling for others whatever they have managed to accomplish during this time.
So, I encourage you to reach out to disaffected families who might want to abandon public education if it fails to improve. You are the vanguard, so it is time to hone the weapons of inquiry in your quest to explore the mystery where meaning is to be found.
Because your piece addresses what could be the most important and disturbing educational issue Oregon is facing this year — one that, not addressed properly, could wipe out all that teachers of my generation learned from those who preceded us, I hope you will indulge me if I share with you more than you might normally expect from a comment made upon your article.
As someone who benefited from learning a student-centered, teacher-directed brainstorming inductive approach to reading poetry from Dr. Lara Jane Stewart, a leader in the University School movement based on the John Dewey’s approach to learning: present students with a problem to solve that engages their interest, having them to share what they already know until they realize they need to know something more to go further. She would share Poetic Truths that poets understood, just as artists understand certain truths about how color and composition work. Presenting this method to us as she would present it to elementary and middle school students, she realized that our focus was to discover what the poem meant rather than experiencing the poem to understand what it was about. When we failed to notice certain aspects of the poem, that told her what poems to present that would strengthen our ability to appreciate their importance. There were no right answers, just good questions. Ironically, Ohio State University Chancellors decided to close mid-year the University School, a recognized leader in developing new approaches to learning for 20 years, as a response to student protests on the OSU campus that had no connection to the OSU University School.
Later in my career when I discovered that I had no idea how to teach reading and writing language arts to inner city high school students who never learned in elementary school, I left full-time teaching and entered a Cal State L.A. program where Dr. Constance Amsden showed her students how to teach grammar from the ground up. If I were to teach today’s English Language Arts teachers what they need to know to increase their personal agency as educators, I might call it “Back to Basics with Poetry and Grammar.” As I share this method with you, I am doing so knowing its limitations could be addressed with the help of computers. This would not be in the form of lessons presented online and reinforced by their classroom teachers. Rather, the computers would allow teachers to create their own lessons, learn as we all do from the mistakes we make, and improve upon what they learned so they own what they discover works for their students.
Bear with me as I share with you what I learned from 80-year-old Professor Amsden. This is a lesson I presented as a sub last December to third-grade students after calling their teacher for permission to do so. This lesson can be taught to younger students as well in that it relies on students’ unconscious understand of oral language as it transitions them to a conscious understanding of written language. This is something no computer program being sold to districts right now can do on its own. Yet, it is something computers could help teachers do if there were funding to create a program that would allow teachers to create word lists suggested by their students that could be dragged into a space where it could be placed in sentences students were creating together or, later, creating on their own. Constance Amsden taught us her color-coding dialogical approach to grammar. It began with two-word sentences like the following: “Birds fly.” She handed out red and blue strips to place under words in response to questions asked. The idea is that questions direct our quest for information. Ask “when?” to find out “when”; ask “how?” to find out how. With the sentence above ask, “What word tells you what’s happening? Place a red marker under that word.” Markers allowed her to see how students were proceeding. If there was disagreement, she would ask students to explain their answers. Next, she would incorporate the answer to that last question in the next question asked: “What word tells you who or what fly? Place a blue marker under that word.” She followed this with two more sentences (“Candles burn.” & “Children play.”) calling on volunteers to ask each question as it related to each sentence. Then, she asked whether there was anything we noticed. We saw that blue came before red in each sentence. Then, she passed out yellow markers for a three-word sentence: “Children play games.” Here, the third step was, “De you see any word that tells you whom or what children play? If so, put a yellow marker under that word.” The next sentence was “John likes Mary,” followed by “Mary likes John.” With these, students suddenly saw that the order of words determines the information they convey to the reader. Rather than teaching syntactical terminology, this method helps student comprehend what they are reading.
But, let me take this a little further. With the third-grade students I was teaching, I returned to “Birds fly.” I asked them if they knew any exceptions. Hands went up immediately, each student offering examples of birds that don’t fly. Then, I told them that there were Statements of Fact: those were statements subject to being proved not true. Then, there were statements of opinion, like “Fried chicken is delicious,” which are statements of opinion that are not subject to being tested in this manner. “You have identified many birds that do not fly. Does this mean that the sentence ‘Birds fly’ is not true?” ‘No,” they told me. “What if I said, ‘All birds fly’? Is that true?” “No” was their reply. So, then, what does “Birds fly” mean? “’Birds flew’ tells you this happened in the past. Does ‘Birds fly’ mean this is happening right now?” They didn’t think so. As we talked about it, they could see that enough birds have been seen flying in the past and in the present that we might assume they would continue flying in the future. So, this is really stating the enough birds fly that it is fair to tell others that ‘birds fly,’ knowing that there may be some exceptions. This goes far beyond what third grade students are being taught right now.
So, let me tell you the limits of this approach. Because I was teaching ninth-grade students, I had them write above words or phrases the questions that they answered. It was the difficulty students faced in managing to hold a pencil and to write out sentences and write above each word or phrase what question was being answered made this a tedious exercise. However, if they had “thought bubbles” to drag above these words and phrases to tell what information they provided, this would have worked very well. Then, students could create their own sentences, dragging words from word lists into their sentences, changing their positions as they experimented with different ways to share with others what they intended to say.
If this were possible, and I believe such a program could be developed that teachers could use on their own, this would give students and teachers agency in exploring how language works to create meaning. Without agency, work quickly becomes drudgery. With agency, that drudgery can be endured.
I share this with you not to say that I have a solution to solve the problem we face. Rather, I am saying that we need to allow teachers to engage in collegial professional development supported by financial rewards as they learn to learn from each other.
The phrase “ Our policymakers have come to value that which is measurable, rather than measure what is valuable,” so well sums up a significant part of the problem. Thank you for this thoughtful article. It should be required reading for all of our state lawmakers.
One comment about those coming to Bend from other states. This, as John and Laurie have said, is a national problem. Just as legislation at the national level is only as effective as it implemented at that state and local level, our representatives at all levels need to be included in this discussion. There are national professional organizations that have yet to address the political efforts to undermine the best efforts of educators, researching studying cognitive development, and educational theorists like Kieran Egan, respected by the international educational community but seldom mentioned south of the Canadian border, but whose work on 5 stages of cognitive development have yet to gain traction in the USA, whose death last month was hardly noticed:
In his obituary, a colleague in Mexico shared a list of his advice to her which speaks to the work that you are doing:
Believe in your students, in the value of their ideas, in their willingness to learn, give them opportunities to also believe in themselves.
Support your students' projects and initiatives, give them quality feedback, listen carefully.
Question your own beliefs, your ideas, your predispositions about the world.
Learning is the most beautiful capacity we have.
There is no authentic wisdom without humility.
Be coherent. What you teach about education, live it, too. The best teaching is given by example.
Dedicating ourselves to education is a mission that carries great responsibility. Improving it is possible.
An education where imagination is the heart of learning is possible.
Our mentors are many; their followers are few. Your efforts are a continuation of their struggle to change the world through education. Crisis is where opportunity and danger are one. Let us recognize this moment for what it is.
Thank you for letting me be part of your discussion.
Let me add a bit more in terms of strategies that I believe would work to gain support. As a retired senior in Bend, Oregon, which has become a Zoom town, I bring my totally engaging Australian Labradoodle to my local off-leash dog-park, leaving her to zoom with other dogs while I engage parents, grandparents, visitors from other states, and IT developers. Almost all of them understand the limitations of online instruction. Parents found nothing compelling about instruction they found trivial and boring. Encouraging their children to focus on the lesson seemed hardly worth the effort. IT developers understand the opportunity created by COVID as well as the limitations of those creating programs, hoping to find buyers who know as little about technology as they do about education. Constantly, I hear complaints about the failure of teachers to focus on spelling and to have abandoned cursive, which helps students gain a better recognition of words as they experience how letters connect to create certain sounds. If oral language captured the sounds and images of the world embodied in sounds that replicate experience, knowing how to spell the names of political leaders, nations, capitals, composers, plants, and animals allows students to own them rather than be diminished by a world over which they have no handle for control. When I suggest that having instruction that is actually respected by adults might encourage them to learn how to support learners at home and in their classrooms, they let me know that this makes sense but have no idea what incentive would be needed to get them up to speed. If we were training interns in college to work in our schools and inviting members of the community and interested high school students to join them, we could develop a cadre of tutors and aides capable of working to individualize instruction and support group instruction for those who need it. While COVID developed a market for online learning, it also revealed the shortcomings of instruction that separated students from being physically connected to their subjects. Cooking and shop provide concrete experience for measurements, ratios, and angles. Singing brings tone, emotion, and rhythm to words, along with the intention that comes with having an audience receive what's being communicated. Project based learning that is truly based on exploring a subject in depth creates a sense of depth and accomplishment that getting the right answers on a summative assessment does not.
In short, you have broad support for questioning the value of virtual schools and online education. School boards hunkered down in their bunkers now see parents as a potential threat and are loath to give them the opportunity to voice their concerns. But, for you, they can be your greatest asset. I fear that teachers are too overwhelmed right now to realize the benefit of supporting the effort you are leading to fight on their behalf. Unlike those who have retired from full-time teachers but remain educators for life, they have families to support, mortgages to pay off, grades to turn in, and a learning curve to master the iPad programs their students are using to receive lessons they need to absorb in order to try to present them as effectively as they can. That is as much agency as they are being offered at this time, other than modeling for others whatever they have managed to accomplish during this time.
So, I encourage you to reach out to disaffected families who might want to abandon public education if it fails to improve. You are the vanguard, so it is time to hone the weapons of inquiry in your quest to explore the mystery where meaning is to be found.
Thank you for leading the effort,
Gregg Heacock
310-625-0946
Bend, Oregon
John M. Rexford & Laurie Wimmer,
Because your piece addresses what could be the most important and disturbing educational issue Oregon is facing this year — one that, not addressed properly, could wipe out all that teachers of my generation learned from those who preceded us, I hope you will indulge me if I share with you more than you might normally expect from a comment made upon your article.
As someone who benefited from learning a student-centered, teacher-directed brainstorming inductive approach to reading poetry from Dr. Lara Jane Stewart, a leader in the University School movement based on the John Dewey’s approach to learning: present students with a problem to solve that engages their interest, having them to share what they already know until they realize they need to know something more to go further. She would share Poetic Truths that poets understood, just as artists understand certain truths about how color and composition work. Presenting this method to us as she would present it to elementary and middle school students, she realized that our focus was to discover what the poem meant rather than experiencing the poem to understand what it was about. When we failed to notice certain aspects of the poem, that told her what poems to present that would strengthen our ability to appreciate their importance. There were no right answers, just good questions. Ironically, Ohio State University Chancellors decided to close mid-year the University School, a recognized leader in developing new approaches to learning for 20 years, as a response to student protests on the OSU campus that had no connection to the OSU University School.
Later in my career when I discovered that I had no idea how to teach reading and writing language arts to inner city high school students who never learned in elementary school, I left full-time teaching and entered a Cal State L.A. program where Dr. Constance Amsden showed her students how to teach grammar from the ground up. If I were to teach today’s English Language Arts teachers what they need to know to increase their personal agency as educators, I might call it “Back to Basics with Poetry and Grammar.” As I share this method with you, I am doing so knowing its limitations could be addressed with the help of computers. This would not be in the form of lessons presented online and reinforced by their classroom teachers. Rather, the computers would allow teachers to create their own lessons, learn as we all do from the mistakes we make, and improve upon what they learned so they own what they discover works for their students.
Bear with me as I share with you what I learned from 80-year-old Professor Amsden. This is a lesson I presented as a sub last December to third-grade students after calling their teacher for permission to do so. This lesson can be taught to younger students as well in that it relies on students’ unconscious understand of oral language as it transitions them to a conscious understanding of written language. This is something no computer program being sold to districts right now can do on its own. Yet, it is something computers could help teachers do if there were funding to create a program that would allow teachers to create word lists suggested by their students that could be dragged into a space where it could be placed in sentences students were creating together or, later, creating on their own. Constance Amsden taught us her color-coding dialogical approach to grammar. It began with two-word sentences like the following: “Birds fly.” She handed out red and blue strips to place under words in response to questions asked. The idea is that questions direct our quest for information. Ask “when?” to find out “when”; ask “how?” to find out how. With the sentence above ask, “What word tells you what’s happening? Place a red marker under that word.” Markers allowed her to see how students were proceeding. If there was disagreement, she would ask students to explain their answers. Next, she would incorporate the answer to that last question in the next question asked: “What word tells you who or what fly? Place a blue marker under that word.” She followed this with two more sentences (“Candles burn.” & “Children play.”) calling on volunteers to ask each question as it related to each sentence. Then, she asked whether there was anything we noticed. We saw that blue came before red in each sentence. Then, she passed out yellow markers for a three-word sentence: “Children play games.” Here, the third step was, “De you see any word that tells you whom or what children play? If so, put a yellow marker under that word.” The next sentence was “John likes Mary,” followed by “Mary likes John.” With these, students suddenly saw that the order of words determines the information they convey to the reader. Rather than teaching syntactical terminology, this method helps student comprehend what they are reading.
But, let me take this a little further. With the third-grade students I was teaching, I returned to “Birds fly.” I asked them if they knew any exceptions. Hands went up immediately, each student offering examples of birds that don’t fly. Then, I told them that there were Statements of Fact: those were statements subject to being proved not true. Then, there were statements of opinion, like “Fried chicken is delicious,” which are statements of opinion that are not subject to being tested in this manner. “You have identified many birds that do not fly. Does this mean that the sentence ‘Birds fly’ is not true?” ‘No,” they told me. “What if I said, ‘All birds fly’? Is that true?” “No” was their reply. So, then, what does “Birds fly” mean? “’Birds flew’ tells you this happened in the past. Does ‘Birds fly’ mean this is happening right now?” They didn’t think so. As we talked about it, they could see that enough birds have been seen flying in the past and in the present that we might assume they would continue flying in the future. So, this is really stating the enough birds fly that it is fair to tell others that ‘birds fly,’ knowing that there may be some exceptions. This goes far beyond what third grade students are being taught right now.
So, let me tell you the limits of this approach. Because I was teaching ninth-grade students, I had them write above words or phrases the questions that they answered. It was the difficulty students faced in managing to hold a pencil and to write out sentences and write above each word or phrase what question was being answered made this a tedious exercise. However, if they had “thought bubbles” to drag above these words and phrases to tell what information they provided, this would have worked very well. Then, students could create their own sentences, dragging words from word lists into their sentences, changing their positions as they experimented with different ways to share with others what they intended to say.
If this were possible, and I believe such a program could be developed that teachers could use on their own, this would give students and teachers agency in exploring how language works to create meaning. Without agency, work quickly becomes drudgery. With agency, that drudgery can be endured.
I share this with you not to say that I have a solution to solve the problem we face. Rather, I am saying that we need to allow teachers to engage in collegial professional development supported by financial rewards as they learn to learn from each other.
What has happened to the funding goal of the Quality Education Model, which I thought was one set of goal posts for the Quality Education Commission?